From a Distance: Roberto Cuoghi’s artist films

There is a continuous thread of ‘metamorphosis’ in Roberto Cuoghi’s practice, curator Luca Cerizza once asserted, of ‘constant transformation and change, the hybridization of forms and identities.’ This temperament might be antithetical to our current time, where stasis permeates empty public spaces. Through his recent artist films, however, Cuoghi offers us fittingly unexpected abstractions for our precarious moment, putting New York City and a spoken word practice into relative focus. We hear the disembodied voices of gallerist Rachel Lehmann and Italo-Russian artist Marc Vincent Kalinka, ‘alone at last’, they quip, on a deserted street or subway station.