The Wasp and The Host

It was precisely this possibility that fired Cuoghi’s curiosity. It also explains the remarkably varied character of Pepsis. When Cuoghi exhibited work from the ongoing series at Hauser & Wirth in New York early in 2023, he spoke of it almost as a group show. It consists of at least four distinctive sub-series, along with several unique and unclassifiable works. One significant sub-series comprises painted portraits; another is made up of paintings depicting bundles of recycling materials; he has made numerous watercolors representing vivid and fantastic animals, insects and human figures, as well as models of cakes that reproduce those served at famous celebrations in the recent past. Among the sundry unique works is an extraordinary fifteen-foot-wide tapestry based on a splayed-out globe. This emerged from a yearlong collaboration with a master weaver from Flanders and ended with Cuoghi and his studio assistants stitching parts of it by hand. It’s a sumptuously beautiful thing, but it’s also dark. It depicts an entire world plunged into night, and it also resembles a black spider, which hardly seems a coincidence given the name of the series. Much of the work on Pepsis began shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic swept Europe and America, and the mood of the period colors aspects of it. But Cuoghi is reluctant to see that period as important. “For many people,” he says, “the idea of something definitive in it is irresistible.” Similarly, he insists that the splayed-out globe’s resemblance to a spider is not significant. (“But it is amusing and significant that everyone tells me this,” he says wryly) and he rejects the idea that unique and unclassifiable works. One significant sub-series comprises painted portraits; another is made up of paintings depicting bundles of recycling materials; he has made numerous watercolors representing vivid and fantastic animals, insects and human figures, as well as models of cakes that reproduce those served at famous celebrations in the recent past. Among the sundry unique works is an extraordinary fifteen-foot-wide tapestry based on a splayed-out globe. This emerged from a yearlong collaboration with a master weaver from Flanders and ended with Cuoghi and his studio assistants stitching parts of it by hand. It’s a sumptuously beautiful thing, but it’s also dark. It depicts an entire world plunged into night, and it also resembles a black spider, which hardly seems a coincidence given the name of the series. Much of the work on Pepsis began shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic swept Europe and America, and the mood of the period colors aspects of it. But Cuoghi is reluctant to see that period as important. “For many people,” he says, “the idea of something definitive in it is irresistible.” Similarly, he insists that the splayed-out globe’s resemblance to a spider is not significant. (“But it is amusing and significant that everyone tells me this,” he says wryly) and he rejects the idea that the motif of the world by night is any kind of key to the series as a whole. Cuoghi calls Pepsis simply “a version of things, flattened . . . Pepsis doesn’t have a center and doesn’t have a solution.”

Imitation has long been an underlying theme in Cuoghi’s work and has been so since, in his early twenties, he decided to “age” himself into the form of an elderly man. His model was Gerhard Dannemann, the German-born founder of the eponymous cigar company. Cuoghi gained some forty-five pounds, dyed his hair and beard gray and borrowed some of his father’s clothes. A photograph from the period shows him shambling about in a nondescript, baggy raincoat and outdated glasses. He maintained this guise, astonishingly, for seven years until transitioning back to his younger self. As he now puts it, he was old and then grew up, recalling the line from Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages”: “Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.” At the time, Cuoghi didn’t regard this transformation as a work of art, and despite critics’ and curators’ eagerness to make it such, he still excludes it from any official accounting of his work. Of the episode today, he says only: “It happened, but I don’t know what would have happened if it hadn’t.”

Cuoghi was born in Modena in northern Italy in 1973. As a child, he struggled to socialize and labored through some difficult years in school until he began to find a path in his late teens. After receiving a diploma as a biology technician and dietician, he went on to study biology, chemistry and psychology and moved to Milan to work in a women’s psychiatric ward. It was during this period that he began to explore art, guided by classes at Milan’s Academy of Fine Arts. One teacher of particular influence was Alberto Garutti, an artist who nurtured several major figures in Italian art in the 1990s, including Paola Pivi, Meris Angioletti, Lara Favaretto, Diego Perrone and Petrit Halilaj. “He gave me the coordinates,” Cuoghi says, “which is the only thing that anyone can do.” The spirit of Garutti’s classes was discursive and combative, but he was also open-minded and encouraging, and Cuoghi remembers him approving one of his early projects that consisted merely of Cuoghi letting his fingernails grow for a year. They eventually reached five centimeters long, making the simplest of tasks almost impossible.

Not surprisingly, some of Cuoghi’s first projects were shaped by his background in science and therapy. One series, Il Coccodeista (1997), was inspired by a comment made on a TV science program, that the human brain was flexible enough to compensate for changes in vision by adjusting to any new circumstances. Cuoghi put this to the test by constantly wearing a pair of welding goggles mounted with Schmidt-Pechan prisms altered in such a way that they flipped his vision horizontally and vertically. For two days, he was too scared to leave his house; three days later, in desperate exhaustion, he finally removed the goggles. But the experiment led to a series of about seventy self-portraits in which Cuoghi peers out, apparently separated from the world by the goggles, as if gazing from the end of a long tunnel.

Cuoghi’s career now stretches nearly three decades. He represented Italy at the Venice Biennale in 2017, and in the same year a mid-career retrospective of his work toured Europe. Yet he remains a reclusive figure, one who doesn’t like to appear at openings and doesn’t court the press. His unease with the art world found expression early on in a series of portraits of art world figures that depicted its subjects as patients leaving the hospital after a terrible accident, scared, bruised and bandaged. The animus that appeared to motivate the series didn’t prevent collectors from commissioning their own portraits in this mode, perhaps the finest of which is a plasticine bas-relief bust of the Greek patron Dakis Joannou. Tiny figures and objects appear to be struggling to emerge from under the skin on Joannou’s forehead, the fizzing of a mind always on the boil.

It’s not surprising that the germ of Pepsis lies in these early years, when Cuoghi was beginning to emerge in the Milanese art scene, gaining recognition from critics and curators. Cuoghi also speaks about a recent spell in New York, in early 2020, that fired his interest in confronting other artists’ work. He saw more exhibitions than he had seen in many years. “It was an opportunity for a full immersion for the purposes of revulsion,” he says. “I went to see everything I could with the intention of filling myself up with interferences.”

The starting point for the series was an attempt, Cuoghi says, to “stylize” other artists’ work. For him, this means something distinct from imitation. Stylizing signifies simplifying and lightening, which in turn means impoverishing, in order to conserve and communicate something that becomes a model of reference. Cuoghi regards all art as, in some way, a reinterpretation, a regurgitation, a cannibalization. It might not be a good thing because it condemns us to repeat inauthentic formulas, but it’s the way our culture behaves.

For Cuoghi, artists are the Pepsis wasp of ideas, methods, subjects and images that already exist—in this case, even of cakes that already exist. Pepsis includes several model cakes constructed from sugar paste, silicone, resin and French merengue, the confections sourced mostly from marriages that ended in tragedy, like those of Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Charles, Jacqueline Bouvier and John F. Kennedy. But among them is also a reproduction of the cake served at Trump’s inauguration, one that was itself closely modeled on the cake served at Obama’s inauguration. Cuoghi describes the cakes as “faithful replicas of symbols of promises that have turned out badly.” The process of amassing documentation for the cakes, he says, was “very long and tortuous.” Ultimately, it was possible to be meticulous, but that possibility troubled him. “In the field of representation,” he says, “this opportunity condemns us to replication and comparison with the original. Falsifiability has never been a principle of reference in the artistic sphere and authenticity is a strategic driver of brand value.”

Cuoghi’s output has always been highly varied, in part because he prefers a working process led by a struggle to master a technique. For the installation Šuillakku (2008), he learned how to make musical instruments; for the series Putiferio (2016), he learned how to create ceramic crabs. For Imitatio Christi (2017), he created an eccentric workshop for the fabrication of devotional figures of Jesus: the figures were first cast in agar agar, a substance extracted from algae, then left to molder and deform in a series of translucent igloos; finally, their remaining fragments were freeze-dried into sculptural solidity before being pinned to a wall for display. Throughout these widely divergent exercises, the overall impetus for Pepsis has remained Cuoghi’s attempts to escape his own reflexive ways of working and thinking.

Painting has taken on unusual importance. Cuoghi had produced little work in that medium in the past, but it became central to two very different sequences of work in Pepsis: a range of portraits, along with some images of plastic waste baled for recycling. Both are conscious throwbacks. “I’m painting in the most traditional sense of the term,” he says, “I’m using ground pigments, egg yolk and poppy seed oil.” He had to feel his way through the process. “No one ever taught me to choose whether to use titanium white, zinc white or white lead,” he said. “I learned about them from the dealer at the paint store, but it took at least a couple of months to get any credible result.” A similar traditionalism guided some watercolors, a medium he had never used. He deliberately chose to work on a rough brown surface that appeared to falsely simulate something authentically aged.

But if painting is the basis of all these works, they are radically different in style. The watercolors are naïve, illustrative, caricatural and comical. The paintings of recycling materials have a cool palette and a sharp clarity of line and form, yet they verge on abstraction. Cuoghi speaks of them in terms that recall the ambitions of modern masters. “In a landfill,” he says, “Monet would have gotten it at once.”

The portraits, meanwhile, have a brilliant, luminous palette and a looser handling. They also began with a desire to be authentic, “to do portraits like every good painter should, to simulate a vocation, a personality.” Their inspiration was a single photograph that appeared in Time in April 2020, the early height of the pandemic in Europe. The picture showed a wall in the printing works of an Italian newspaper in Erbusco, east of Milan, onto which were pinned some discolored, low-resolution photographs used for obituaries (the newspaper had recently expanded its obituary section to commemorate those who had died during the pandemic). The photographs on the wall appear tiny, pale and milky, but in Cuoghi’s renderings they are enlarged and substantial. What began as snapshots of ordinary people, for whom age and ordinary life exerted a toll even before death unexpectedly overtook them, are transfigured with acidic hues, the faces taking on an unsettling glow that suggests contamination as much as transcendence.

The portraits are both moving and discomfiting, a result of what Cuoghi sees as their ambivalence, their suggestions of good and evil. He has said the work was inspired by an exchange with the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, in which Tuymans argued there was a difference between Catholic and Protestant painting. The former, Tuymans felt, was shaped by the heritage of perspective and the drive to accurately describe volumetric form. Cuoghi, from Catholic southern Europe, decided he would try to escape that supposedly unavoidable heritage, making faces that seem flat and purposefully shapeless.

Therein lies the question that perturbs the whole series. For if the portraits are, as Cuoghi sees them, stylizations and simplifications of painting, how should we interpret them? Whose tributes are they? Do they reflect Cuoghi’s vision? Or are they his impressions of the visual language of others? We will never know, because Cuoghi has no interest in elaborating on his sources, his inspirations, his—if you will—victims. The Pepsis wasp doesn’t reflect on the life of her host; for her, the host is a vehicle and nothing more. What matters is the new life she plants within it.

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Roberto Cuoghi studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where he lives and works. Cuoghi’s practice has no direct influences and doesn’t fit comfortably within any genre of art. His diverse series of works over the past two decades are united by a preoccupation with process. Each new series is different from the last, and Cuoghi moves seamlessly between mediums, mastering form without being defined by any singular style.

Morgan Falconer is a critic and art historian who teaches at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York. He has written about contemporary art for publications including The Times (London), Frieze, The Burlington Magazine, Art Journal, The Economist and Art in America. His books include Painting Beyond Pollock (2015), a history of painting after 1945.