Draft:Enzo Cacciola

Enzo Cacciola was born on December 12, 1945, in Arenzano, in the Italian region of Liguria. He lives and works in Rocca Grimalda, Piedmont.^[1]

Cacciola began painting in the late 1960s, progressively conducting experiments that examined the relationships among surface, support, and colour. These works established the basis for his subsequent analytical approach to painting.

Enzo Cacciola’s first public appearance took place in 1969, when he participated in the XI Premio Diomira at the Galleria Gian Ferrari in Milan.^[2]In 1971, he held his first solo exhibition at Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa.

In the early 1970s, Cacciola produced a number of works addressing surface, support, and colour. Between 1971 and 1973, he developed the Integrative Surfaces cycle. In 1974, he produced a related group of works referred to as Integrated Surfaces, which involved the placement of the canvas in relation to the surrounding wall.^[3]

Cacciola held his first solo exhibition outside Italy at the Victor Vasarely Museum in 1972 in Pécs, Hungary.^[4] In 1973, Cacciola participated in the international exhibition The Golden Nightingale^[5] in Voghera, curated by Palma Bucarelli, then director of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome. The exhibition also included Gianfranco Zappettini, Paolo Cotani, Marco Gastini, and Carmengloria Morales.

Cacciola began using materials such as cement and asbestos in his work in the early 1970s. Between 1974 and 1976, he produced a group of works referred to as the Cements Asbestos cycle, in which cement was applied within a pictorial format.^[6] In 1975, Cacciola participated in the exhibition Analytische Malerei in Düsseldorf, curated by Klaus Honnef, where he presented works from the Cements and Asbests cycles.^[7]

Between 1976 and 1978, he developed a group of works known as Grey Cements, characterised by the use of grey tonalities and cement as the primary material. In these works, cracks appear as a recurring formal element.^[6]

In 1977, Enzo Cacciola was invited to documenta 6 in Kassel. He exhibited in the Malerei (Painting) section, curated by Klaus Honnef and Evelyn Weiss.^[8] At documenta 6, Cacciola exhibited alongside artists such as Joan Miró, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Joseph Beuys, and Anselm Kiefer, among others.^[6]

For this occasion, Cacciola presented works executed in cement and a project documented in the text Operative Process (1975–1977). In this text, he described his use of photography as a means of documenting artistic actions and procedures, stating that the photographic image itself could function as the work. As he wrote in his Operative Process (1975–1977):

“In 1975, I used the photographic medium with special intentions within the photographic canvas and within those issues that the medium offered at that time… Documentation as a fact of the event, the program as a technical procedure in terms of unfolding, as documentation of phases and didactic evidence of the work… In the use I make of photography, the subject–object relationship remains: the I-subject as the artist acting upon the object, as the work of art, is documented by photography, and the photograph itself becomes the work, as an element in itself outside the artist as creative subject and the object as artwork.”^[3]

As part of this project, Cacciola asked the curators Honnef and Weiss to select a painting at least seventy years old to represent him. They chose a Renaissance Venus attributed to Titian’s workshop from the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. The painting was exhibited in Kassel together with a panel displaying the text of Operative Process.

In early 1979, Cacciola began a period of work outside Europe. During this time, he travelled and produced works using materials available in the locations where he was staying.

First, Cacciola resided on the island of Taboga in Panama (1979), where he produced a series of works using local sand and natural materials.“On the island, Cacciola established an operative practice that would mark all his later works: sourcing the necessary material on site, finding a suitable space in which to work, preparing the mixture, manually spreading the paste on entirely free canvases, drying, and producing a photographic record.”^[9] In the same year, he held a solo exhibition^[10] at Georgetown University in Washington, where he presented, for the first time, figurative canvases depicting himself and his daughter in natural surroundings.

In 1980, in Mexico City, at the invitation of Juan Luis Díaz, Cacciola presented the project 36 horas de pintura en San Giacomo. The project involved continuous painting over a period of 36 hours and included photographic documentation of the process. Walter Di Giusto also participated in the exhibition with his own works.^[9]

Cacciola's overseas explorations initiated the cycle later termed “landscapes of painting,” in which he incorporated materials unique to each local environment. This methodology connected his analytical practice to natural contexts and the experience of place, highlighting the interplay among materiality, light, and time.

In 1981, Cacciola participated in the exhibition Pittura in radice^[11] at Galleria Forma in Genoa, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. The exhibition brought together Cacciola, Gianfranco Zappettini, and Walter Di Giusto, and critics interpreted it as a bridge between Analytical Painting and the Transavanguardia, the movement through which Oliva, since the late 1970s, promoted a return to painting freed from ideological frameworks and conceptual rigidity.

In the late 1980s, Cacciola took part in fewer exhibitions and moved to Rocca Grimalda in Piedmont. He became active in the local community and served as mayor, a role he later returned to.^[12]

After showing his work less often for a while, he became more active in the art world again in the early 2000s. He started new projects, including the Multigum series. These pieces use two surfaces, a canvas and a frame, joined with screws and metal bolts. Synthetic resin is poured between them and remains visible after the work is assembled. In the 2010s, Cacciola resumed using cement as a primary material in his Nanodur series. He used elastic cement in different shades, applying it in layers on canvases and frames of various sizes. The works exhibit surface drips and cracks.^[13]

Starting in 2017, Cacciola kept working with natural materials while spending time outside Europe. In Cuba, at the Bay of Pigs, he made cement works in a single color. Later, in Latin America, he used materials like sand, soil, volcanic dust, and thermal mud in his projects. Cacciola continued this approach in Argentina in 2022, creating the Los colores de la tierra series with natural pigments from the Purmamarca region. He showed this series in a solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC) in Salta in 2023. The pigments came from places like La Candelaria, Rosario de la Frontera, and the Cerro de los Siete Colores massif.^[14]

Authors who have written about Cacciola's work include Klaus Honnef, Evelyn Weiss, Filiberto Menna, Catherine Millet, Alberto Rigoni, Bruno Corà, Marco Meneguzzo, Viana Conti, and Achille Bonito Oliva. Cacciola has described his own approach to painting using the phrase “the work becomes the artwork,” referring to the importance he assigned to process and material procedures.