Wheatfields

As society and technology evolve, natural food becomes ever more distant and unfamiliar. We forage and hunt in markets and restaurants rather than forests and prairies; every day we eat foods containing unfamiliar or unnatural ingredients. Most of what we consume is grown, processed, packaged and shipped from someplace far from where we live. By the time we see them, many foods have lost their original shape, texture and appearance. With the current emphasis on eating local foods, sometimes even over organic food from far away, this subject takes on additional relevance.

Wheatfields is a series of minimalist abstract wall sculptures crafted from unexpected materialóspaghetti, soba, undon, rice noodles and seaweed--common food ingredients that have lost the recognizable shape, texture and other qualities of the original grain or plant. Artist Carlo Marcucci's minimal compositions are abstract interpretations of food containers, referencing the disproportionate role of packaging in modern processed food distribution. In a metaphorical sense, the box containing the spaghetti has been reborn as a box constructed of spaghetti.

Marcucci's sculptures, however, reach beyond technical prowess and stunning design. They position the concept of packaged content as a construct in a way that subtly questions our acceptance of food marketing, and how our knowledge of food origins has diminished due to our industrial society and the wide availability of packaged foods.

Each painted wood structure is covered with a thin layer of dry food material, glued strand by strand and placed next to one another, row after row, to create a large three-dimensional linear mosaic. Some of the sculptures are designed as multiple structures, created to incorporate the empty wall space between each section into the overall composition. The color variations arise from the different ingredients used in the manufacture of the pasta. Green spaghetti owes its color to spinach, black spaghetti is due to squid ink and red spaghetti is pigmented with red pepper.

Wheatfields is scheduled for the group exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art in Ueno Park, opening August, 2007. 

Carlo Marcucci

Carlo Marcucci uses the traditional still life as a departure to raise concerns about food production and contamination and the gap between the consumer and foodís natural origins. His painting series, Chemical Still-Life, depicts produce with the chemical structures of contaminants found within each subject portrayed, thus suggesting that as an industrial society we continue to want unblemished, eye-appealing foods at any cost--which--in this case--may be our health.

Marcucci was born in Florence, Italy and spent his childhood in Florence, London and Rome. In 1986 he earned a BFA in Art and Design from the Atlanta College of Art. In 1990, after collaborating with various Atlanta design firms, he moved to Los Angeles to focus on his painting and sculpture and more recently, photography. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Asia and Europe. Wheatfields was most recently exhibited at Kitakyschu Museum of Art, Amagi City, Japan; An-Sei Gallery, Ukiha, Fukuoka, Japan; and the Don Stoker Contemporary Art Gallery, San Francisco. 

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