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by Nicolas Bourriaud
[From the monograph The mystery boy, published by Ed. Gli Ori, Prato, and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, 2003, pp. 61-67]
1. Pourquoi rendre compte du travail d'Italo Zuffi à travers des textes courts, des notes, des fragments ? Tout d'abord, parce qu'il procède d'une manière analogue : ses œuvres ne sont jamais prises dans une série ; hétérogènes les unes aux autres, elles exposent d'une manière laconique une idée, une sensation, un moment, une situation. Chacune d'entre elles semble appartenir à un ensemble considérable qui aurait brusquement disparu. Certaines œuvres agglomèrent et construisent des ensembles ; d'autres, comme celle de Zuffi, dispersent les choses, en restant attentive aux détails... Read more
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by Luca Cerizza
[From the monograph The mystery boy, published by Ed. Gli Ori, Prato, and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, 2003, pp. 21-28]
"I believe we are climates menaced by the threat of a storm that happens elsewhere."
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet by Bernardo Soares
It's like a subtle sensation of undefined menace. Like realizing for the first time that our relationship with reality, the result of our every action, is inevitably tinged by a sense of possible failure. It's never the image of something dramatic, not a violent change. No evident trauma. Actually we never see anything happen, never bear witness to an event that might, in itself, be decisive... Read more
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by Chiara Chelotti
[In Carte d’Arte n. 2, Spring-Summer 1999, p. 57]
Doubt touches the material of authenticity with a creative hand, and in Italo Zuffi’s case all parameters of reference are nullified in violations of physical laws and challenges to the reason of being and appearing. Interior and exterior are remixed in a neurotic doing that 1. undoes the ordinary gaze, 2. extrapolates detail, 3. overturns perspectives, 4. analyses circumstances, 5. overturns the field, 6. creates new configurations and strange families, 7. burns itself up in experience, 8. goes beyond, 9. orders a glass of water... Read more
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by Irene Amore
[From the catalogue of On Air: Video in onda dall'Italia, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea, Monfalcone 2004, p. 358]
To occupy the limit between two zones by staying on the threshold, implies not so much the ability to mark that limit and to restrain the respective zones, as much as it does, instead, the ability to move along the edge by keeping one's balance. Above all when the motion picture camera's eye, watchful, and participative as well, follows the operation's development, by interpreting it with ruthless rigour... Read more
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by Karen Rosenberg
[Critical essay in the brochure of the exhibition Shaking doors, Suite 106, New York 2003]
Italo Zuffi's aesthetic, with its reliance on prosaic materials to explore subtle states of vulnerability, might be labelled "Architecture Povera". Drawn to the insecure and the slightly off-kilter, the rickety and the wobbly, Zuffi creates and records structures that seem destined to fail. One thinks of Giovanni Anselmo's Arte Povera sculpture "Untitled" (Eating Structure) (1968), in which a lettuce joins two stone blocks until its eventual wilting causes the artwork to collapse. But where Anselmo is concerned with the process of organic decay, Zuffi hones in on the hazard of architectural disintegration. Lettuce rots, but buildings come crashing down...
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by Roberto Daolio
[From the monograph L’ultimo ostacolo mentale, Toscanella di Dozza 1998, p. 4]
I am not sure if the capsizing of a physical and real space, through some simple acts of displacement, can take us back to a consideration about the concepts of order and the momentary state of things, or about the relationships we keep with them, whilst inviting for an attitude to elaborate a degree of inquiry from a distance. Where the high and the low, the inside and the outside, the small and the large, the static and the dynamical, can all reveal themselves as artificial agreements, and as equivocal episodes of a project held in a precarious and fragile idea. Rather than this, in Italo Zuffi's ... Read more
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