The first fifteen years of Patrick Tuttofuoco's career in 16 written portraits.
Portraits, Portraits, Portraits represents an attempt to weave two time frames together into a single fabric, to delve into Tuttofuoco's artistic language and bring to light a shared lexicon. As the title makes clear, portraits are the leitmotif that has been chosen to map out the artist's practice: a potential key to interpretation, not intended to be definitive, but which aspires to stimulate and suggest a reading of the work stripped of circumstantial preconceptions. Each of the contributors responded in their own way to this initiative, yielding the choral polyphony that is fundamentally important to Tuttofuoco himself. It is up to the reader to decide whether these ideas hover separately between the lines, or come together to form, page by page, the portrait of an unexpected portraitist.
“This book arose out of the desire and ambition to translate the first fifteen years of Patrick Tuttofuoco's densely visual artistic practice into words. But there is a second important motivation behind this initiative: the belief that the rhetoric that has been used to date in describing Tuttofuoco's aesthetic adventure is too polarized between the pre- and post-2008 periods of his work, and that what is now needed is a tool of interpretation aimed at knitting together these two dimensions that seem antinomic, but upon closer observation are complementary and share the same investigative impulse.”
Nicola Ricciardi
Born 1974 in Milan, Patrick Tuttofuoco lives and works in Milan and Berlin. His practice is conceived as a dialogue between individuals and their ability to transform the environment they inhabit, by exploring notions of community and social integration in order to combine immediate sensorial allure with the power to trigger profound theoretical responses. Tuttofuoco melds Modernism and Pop; he presses figuration into abstraction, using man as the paradigm of existence, as the matrix and measuring unit of reality. From this interpretative and cognitive process, infinite versions of man and the context of his existence are produced, from which shapes able to animate the sculptures are generated.
