Dien Berziga: Cuccurucucù

Tache presents Cuccurucucù, Dien Berziga's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Curated by Ana Teles, the exhibition consists of thirteen new paintings, several made specifically to respond to the gallery's structural features.

 

The exhibition space has been transformed into a playground, in which Berziga's paintings are
arranged as a sequence of discoveries, encountered one by one as the viewer moves through
the rooms. A puppet theatre, a swing, canvases hung near the ceiling, others tucked into
corners, or placed low along the dado rail. Works appear above, below, and to the side,
following a rhythmic movement through the space. The installation guides the viewer through a
series of surprises, asking them to look, to look again, to look differently, to slow down and look
carefully – a game prepared by Berziga who welcomes viewers into his painterly world.

Berziga's paintings are about looking and making relations with what appears on the surface as
he applies paint on the canvas. They depict objects and forms that have the sense of not yet
being completed, suggesting a head, a body, a window, but they are deliberately unresolved,
presenting something almost recognisable without fully committing to it. These are residues of
Berziga’s life: what appears, what blurs, and what returns spontaneously and repeatedly.
Berziga’s paintings derive from places he has encountered across his life: landscapes, buildings, and people from Parma, Beijing, and London. These fragments enter the work freely,
through the act of painting and building layers, absorbed not so much as conscious memories
but as instincts. As academic Mark Hannam notes, “He has lent his brush the ideal pressure, and left his mind there, on the linen.”

Cuccurucucù is a word that belongs to Berziga's own imagery, one that transports him to
Parma, to a time that has passed but that carries on, as his paintings do, into the present. The
word "cuccurucucù" is something between a song and a game, being the call of a bird and the
tick of a clock. In Italian, "cucù" belongs to the language of childhood, the word you say to a child when you cover your face and reappear (a game of hiding and revealing, of something
disappearing and returning). Cuccurucucù is a “portal into a strange but comfortable world, full
of things that carry no direct meaning [...] close to the experience of looking at Berziga's
paintings." – Catherine Li.

A catalogue has been produced to accompany the exhibition, including an interview with the artist and two specially commissioned essays on Berziga’s work.