Hair and Heads; Legs and Shoes

Dario Zucchi’s favorite pictorial vocabulary includes varieties of carefully styled hair and, conversely, of smooth, shiny baldness.  He finds analogies between paintings and hair, whether long, short, wavy, straight, curly, blonde, brunette, black, permed, or braided. Zucchi may juxtapose hair with images displaying similar hairstyles (fig. 069), chest hair (fig. 268), or beards (fig. 283). He is particularly fascinated by the conjunction of wavy or braided hair and textile art, as in figures before the works of Jay DeFeo (fig. 320) and Sheila Hicks (fig. 426). 

Zucchi often finds analogies between long, straight hair, mostly blonde, and representational paintings and photographs. The blonde tresses of the woman standing in front of a Daisuke Sonobe photograph become the molten lava of the volcano (fig. 308). In front of an Andy Rouse photograph, the shoulder-length hair of the figure joins with the light issuing from the clouds (fig. 309). In another example the blonde hair of the woman perfectly matches the long, flowing locks in a work by Jeff Koons (fig. 339). One of Zucchi’s most memorable images presents a woman in front of a large photomural reproduction of a Roy Lichtenstein painting (fig. 209).  Here the artist finds the perfect juxtaposition of the blonde hair of the reproduction with the hair of the onlooker, right down to the visitor’s dark roots.

Baldness is another area in Zucchi’s exploration of visual puns. Men’s shiny heads may be absorbed into a design (fig. 007) or parallel figures depicted in a painting (fig. 483). An odd element in a background may become an unusual bit of headwear over a bald head (figs. 242 and 433). A notable example in Zucchi’s work is inspired by an installation by Wolfgang Laib at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (fig. 220).  A bald, African-American man has wandered into the intimate space of Laib’s Wax Room. The room, covered in fragrant beeswax, measures six feet by seven feet, and ten feet tall. Dario Zucchi’s photograph records this unplanned moment, contrasting the bleak, solitary, hanging bulb of the installation with the brief glimmer of light on the smooth brown pate of the figure. 

Considering the inherent problems with point-of-view, shoes play a minor role in Zucchi’s work. A museum visitor’s shoes cannot be easily juxtaposed with two-dimensional works. In sculpture, however, the photographer sometimes captures legs and shoes in surprising conjunctions. A child’s disembodied legs suddenly emerge from an Arnaldo Pomodoro bronze in an early Zucchi image (fig. 002). Pomodoro himself expressed his appreciation for the visual play in the photographer’s composition in a note of 2012. Zucchi employs a similar strategy with Russell Crotty’s sculpture (fig. 013), which appears to have just grown feet of its own. Legs themselves are the subject of an unusual image in Zucchi’s work, a parallel between the shapely, long legs of a woman in a short skirt staring at a photograph of similar long legs (fig. 252). The visual analogy parallels the surprise and delight that Zucchi experienced when realizing the photograph.