Santiago Cucullu
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1969.
Lives and works in Milwaukee, United States.

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Argentinean born artist Santiago Cucullu creates multi-media works that culminate in spatially unified and conscious installations. Often arranged with elaborate wall-sized murals, movable sculpture, and vibrant works on paper, Cucullu emphasizes the subtleties of intuitive pacing and spatial orientation experienced in his broad installations. Specifically, Cucullu creates readymade structures through a duality of materials and appropriation to indicate the oscillation and ability of his objects to physically shift towards creating alternate solutions and the ultimate collapsibility in the overall appearance of his work.

Up until 2007 Cucullu’s work frequently alluded to political imagery, most notably the 1920’s and 1930’s anarchism of his native Argentina. Often harsh physical imagery (such as gallows) are blended with illusory, unknown forms, contrasting the ideas of reality and fantasy. Using found and researched imagery as well as his own photographs, his watercolors serve as an integral part to the comprehensive dialogue he creates with his work, often offering point blank references to the imagery and iconography seen in the other mediums. During the last few years Cucullu’s imagery has shifted towards something that he refers to as “blatant localism”, and takes inspiration from daily walks in and around Milwaukee, the US city where he has resided since 2005. He describes this shift as having to do with a lived experience of another type of history, one that although often banal can be personally verified and quantified.