Lello Masucci

Lello Masucci is an artist who works with various media, combining many painting techniques, including digital ones. During his artistic career, which he began in 1970, he met Julian Beck and Judith Malina (Living Theatre) who were extremely important for his artistic research. His 1976's performance called Identify Cube: Document Size is in Mario Franco's video, about the neapolitan avantgarde from 70' that we can find in San Martino Museum (Napoli) and various archives.

From 1980 he strongly resumed his pictorial research, especially with hand made mixed pictorial technique and large hand made works. We can define him a rebellious spirit and after many exhibitions in Europe, including a collective in Milano (Il Milione art gallery) and the personal exhibition in Roma (Sylvia Franchi's art gallery) with an introduction by Filiberto Menna, then he refused the XI Quadriennale of Rome.

After that, other personal exhibitions in many art galleries (Art gallery in Milano, Borgogna - Shubert, St. Paul De Vance Musee, etc.). He won City of Marsala Award with a great hand made work between painting and installation called Sacchi di notti napoletane during the Biennale Del Sud - Academy of Fine Arts. He was selected for the exhibition "The last 40 years of sculpture in Napoli" in 1986 (Real Palace - Naples).

Therefore, Japanese art critics and historians about Japanese art noticed him, so they decided to invite Masucci to the TOKYO EXPO for a personal exhibition on 200 square meters of exhibition space. Already in the early nineties, he made one of the first Internet Provider in the South of Italy, DIM.IT. now disappeared.

So he begun the pioneering research about aesthetic possibilities of communication and its implications on a possible Electronic Literature Theory. As a pioneer in Italy, he studied many programming languages (Lingo, Python, Java, C, C++, PHP, HTML, XML,Java Script, etc.) and he studied digital processing programs (Photoshop, Premiere, Final Cut, Director, File Maker, Flash,Blender, etc.).

His research lead him to the theatrical results, strongly linked to concepts about analogic and digital interactivity. In 2000 he presented an art installation called On The Air based on internet links, in the prestigious Maschio Angioino Castle in Naples. He put in scene on the net by computer, a play that took place in contemporary between Napoli and New York.

In 2009 a personal exhibition at the PAN (Palazzo Arti Napoli - Electa Catalog). There are a series of works that he defined as hybrid nature, because there are analogic and digital techniques. Among these works, we can find Poema Notturno Rosso (Red Night Poem) which is created by internet users through a software of his own development and it made a series of works on paper and a simultaneous video installation on two European squares (Napoli and Barcellona) during "E-Poetry 2009".

He partecipated in the collateral events of 53° Biennale Di Venezia with Caterina Davinio. In 2014, he conceived and created OLE.01, the first Great Festival of digital art in the prestigious Royal Palace in Napoli and other prestigious locations all around Campania (Napoli and other cities). In 2016 he opened in Napoli Lello Masucci Art Studio - Deposito di Arte Contemporanea at Palazzo Spinelli in Via Tribunali, 362.

There he begun a new personal artistic life about painting hand made. In 2018 the MADRE Museum acquired his hand made opera Sacchi di notti napoletane, an artistic installation composed of a mixed technique on canvas and objects: a cart with 7 sacks above, representing the nights of Napoli. His paintings are in museums and in important private art collections, in Italy and abroad.