Hats and Hoods

Headwear provides Dario Zucchi with another opportunity to seek visual connections between visitors and art. The artist integrates the shapes and colors of hats and hoods into both representational and abstract compositions. In each case these new combinations transform our perception of the original artwork into something different and unique.

Zucchi is particularly fond of the black fedora, a common hat in Italy during the twentieth century. Sometimes he silhouettes the hat against a black design, allowing the fedora to become part of the overall composition (figs. 058 and 450). In other cases he positions the profile of a black hat and coat in front of an illusionistic space, allowing the figure to “inhabit” the uninhabited scene (figs. 370 and 388). This strategy functions equally well with a hoodie positioned against a painted canvas (figs. 246 and 466).  Color is sometimes the dominant element in Zucchi’s striking juxtapositions, as with the hoodies in two 2017 photographs (figs. 455 and 464).

Occasionally Zucchi juxtaposes his viewers with similarly dressed figures in contemporary paintings, as before a work by Alex Katz (fig. 334) or before the boating scene of Julio Larraz (fig. 481). These confrontations are more common in Zucchi’s photographs of visitors with nineteenth and early twentieth-century paintings (see the section After the Masters).  In one modern example, however, the artist employs a white hat both to parallel a geometric shape in a design and to indicate the viewer’s avid interest in a figure’s anatomy (fig. 322).   The unusually suggestive placement of the woman in the Carroll Dunham work succeeds due to the analogy between the shape of the hat and the rounded cheeks of the painted figure’s derriere.

Sometimes Zucchi connects the color and texture of a woven hat with a similar motif in a painting. In one instance, a woman in a white knit cap stares at the dramatic Robert Longo image of a nuclear mushroom cloud (fig. 085). In a similar way, we are intended to admire the clever juxtaposition of a multicolor knit toque of the museum visitor seemingly beneath a bottle of red liquid in Viviane Sassen’s photograph (fig. 068). Texture is also a key element in Zucchi’s analogy between a completely draped figure and the recycled patches of cloth in the art of Ibrahim Mahama (fig. 364).  In these works we are not meant to read any social or political messages into Zucchi’s photographs, simply to enjoy the visual parallels.