Davide Stucchi Shines Light on Habits, Desires and Biological Needs

Milan-based artist Davide Stucchi makes work about bodies, attuned to the cues that direct their movement: habits, desires and biological needs. In a mise-en-scène of material markers of absence, his exhibition, ‘DS’, at Deborah Schamoni abstracts and anthropomorphizes everyday items, imagining a continuation of their ‘lives’ as spectres of the bodies that interact with them when those human forms are absent.

The exhibition centres around five mobiles made from light bulbs and clothes hangers, which are suspended from the gallery’s existing ceiling light rods. As suggested by the title of the show, which carries both the initials of the artist and the gallery, ‘DS’ is structured by grafting one place on to another: the mobiles correspond to where the light fixtures hang in Stucchi’s apartment in Milan, their constellation delineating an invisible floor plan that leaves much of the gallery in Munich empty. Through a shared economy of line, the lighting system and this minimal sculptural intervention create a delicate interplay – their connection literally lighting the bulbs. It’s a moment in the exhibition which marks Stucchi’s broader concern with the motif and material of electric charge: a way to use the banal trappings of domesticity to talk about getting turned on.

Reassembling configurations of wall works exhibited in Stucchi’s 2019 exhibition, ‘2546/9728’, at Sundogs in Paris, elements of the mobiles morph into vaguely phallic shapes or evoke pierced noses in profile. These forms, which were previously distinct shapes, interact and shift in the mobiles as Stucchi takes a compelling step from the playfully altered readymade towards a multi-layered abstraction. Like spatial drawings, the works recall Andy Warhol’s ink-on-paper drawing, Truman’s Hand (c.1952): both instil the thin grey line with tenderness, a gently erotic tracing of a negative space so potent it materializes absence. 

Outlines of a flaccid penis and a pointed nose shape shift in Milan (Mobile 5) Bedroom (2020), gesturing at a masculine body stripped of its symbolic and physical heft. The work’s central structure is a large circle, framing and highlighting the room’s emptiness. The mobile articulates masculinity through a lack, and though the penis is still recognizable, transgresses a manhood implicitly defined by possession of the phallus. Suspended over an imaginary bed (as suggested in the title), the mobile also seems to speak to a kind of longing, as if a daydream’s fragmented scenes slowly turned overhead: visions of someone who is no longer there.

The notion of absence unfolds further through the four-channel sound piece (Soundscape for DS (work in progress), 2020 (Quadrophonic Memories for Absent Bodies) (2020), which surrounds the spatial interventions from speakers positioned in the room’s four corners. Artist and composer Lukas Heerich strung the piece together from runway soundtracks, which Stucchi has collected obsessively over the years. Crafted to choreograph models in clothes, these merged tracks begin to shape the space instead, as the sensation of the music moving in and out of the bare room is almost visceral.

While fashion – its seductive glamour and the daily routine of dressing and presenting a version of yourself – is a starting point for the artist’s consideration of the body, emptiness is at the core of ‘DS’. The show is also imbued with the artist’s own absence, as he was not able to see the exhibition in person due to Covid-19-related travel restrictions. In a time overwhelmingly void of physical contact, captured in images of isolation and empty spaces, Stucchi’s sparse installation manages to find levity in this visual language. He taps into the potential for boundlessness that arises when everything is stripped away.

_{Main image: Davide Stucchi, 'DS', exhibition view, Deborah Schamoni, Munich. Courtesy: the artist and Deborah Schamoni, Munich; photograph: Ulrich Gebert}