Deborah Schamoni

The exhibition is the first collaborative project emerging from a long standing artistic relationship between artist Davide Stucchi and artist and architect Corrado Levi.

Davide presents series of felt-tip pen drawings, a body of work obsessively accumulated and constantly redrawn over the years, exhibited here for the first time, focusing on few allegories of body parts. Penises forming a hand, holes as mouths, smiles and a flowering fallus.Levi responded to the drawings with a series of drawings where he redrew from memory some of his architectural projects. All the works in the exhibition have been framed by Stucchi.

The collaborative project can be read as a meditation on queer masculinity in a time when masculinity is being rightfully questioned and challenged. Here, between an artistic father figure loved and loathed and phallic symbolisms both in the human body and sub specie architecture, masculinity is dialectically dressed and revealed.

Stucchi often talks about how difficult was to speak about queerness in his work with another artistic father figure, his Accademia di Belle Arti teacher Alberto Garutti, who he recalls would respond with an emblematic ‘I am just a simple guy’ when the topic was raised. So Levi, who lives between Milan and New York, became for Stucchi an alternative artistic father and also his best older frenemy.

Levi, who was born in 1936 in Turin, is a legendary architect turned artist who after graduating with Carlo Mollino became Franco Albini closest collaborator and together with pioneering queer theorist Mario Mieli co-founded F.U.O.R.I. (Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano) a LGBT revolutionary group, which mixed political activism with self-awareness as a radical queer practice. He is also a prolific writer, notably of the New Kamasutra, a sado-masochist pamphlet written in the US in the late seventies and also co-conspirator of many artists many of whom he has supported at the beginning of their careers. Levi co-founded the One Hotel in Kabul with Alighiero Boetti, an experiment in the business of hosting.

Levi is not particularly eager to speak about the past and in fact his relationship with Stucchi is rooted in a hunger for the here and now, however for this exhibition, and this is perhaps a testament to how close the two artists are, agreed to look back to his architectural work, which he resolutely avoids speaking about otherwise.

Text: zaza', Naples
Photos: zaza', Naples