It’s really hard to choose between high-pressure volubility or pure exhibitionism when it comes to saying what it is that drives the exuberant figures that Saverio Lucariello paints, sculpts or simply exposes to our dumbfounded gaze. What is exchanged there, in the course of all kinds of unexpected metamorphoses, partakes of an eloquence whose meaning we have pretty much lost sight of, and that is constantly reminding us of our twofold organic and orotund nature, lacing and interlacing possibly primitive times as much as a reputedly learned age whose weary and standardised pranks are running out of steam in the new salons of culture and art. The truth is that Saverio Lucariello belongs to no “age,” and even if his age is, nevertheless, the age of art and artists, then he plays on it in a hybrid manner that is grating or sensual, shocking or offhand, free of the bitterness or headiness that divides contemporaries, depending on what they are celebrating, on whether they are welcoming or dreading the end. In other words, Saverio Lucariello is neither “modern” nor “postmodern” nor any pre-this or post-that, and his contemporaries are to be found in all sorts of nooks and crannies of art history, from Bosch to Baroque to De Dominicis, from Gracian to Manganelli via Carmelo Bene. A ticklish chap, he likes to tickle and sometimes irritate our artistic and intellectual itches, a bit like those hanging, twirling tufts of hair that goad his classical Venuses and his sublime Gold Cube.