Art by Mattia Cuttini 2025 / Text by Chiara Braidotti May 2026 / Pictures by Giada Cattarossi
Accumulation Plan 0 / Rubberstamped china ink on paper, 60 x 76 cm / 2025
Accumulation Plan 1 / Rubberstamped china ink on paper, 60 x 76 cm / 2025
In finance, a capital accumulation plan (CAP) is a strategy founded on repetition. It involves constant investments distributed over time, capable of generating value through compound capitalization. This practice promises a future of slow, stable and predictable economic growth, to be glimpsed over the course of years.
In Accumulation Plans, a series of rubberstamp configurations created by Mattia Cuttini between November and December 2025, the time scale is first and foremost the present time of artistic practice; growth concerns the volume of ink on the surface of the sheet; value no longer coincides with profit but with the sedimentation of gesture, with the material persistence of the mark and the meditative quality of the act of leaving it on paper.
Accumulation Plan 2 / Rubberstamped china ink on paper, 60 x 76 cm / 2025
In the eight works that make up the series, accumulation takes shape imprint by imprint. The repetition they share with financial CAPs is not automated but measured by the manual act of stamping, by a sequence of minimal and stubborn actions that allow the marks to inhabit the white space that Cuttini grants them. Temporality is no longer that of financial decades, but the concrete one made of hours and days spent in the studio. The India ink deposited on acid-free paper leaves a trace destined to last, a physical record of a precise moment, of the pressure exerted by the artist, of the alternation of marks and voids generated by the mental algorithm governing the works’ production. Each impression bears witness to a precise gesture, a breath, a repeated act that transforms the surface of the sheet into a field of tensions.
In the compositions of Accumulation Plans, the language of rubberstamp frees itself from the customary orthogonal grid used by the artist, but does so in a calibrated manner. The juxtaposition of stamped forms allows diagonals, dramatic cuts and carefully considered spatial negotiations to emerge, revisiting experiments carried out by Cuttini in 2020 such as Out of Grid and ACT2, while still maintaining the rigor of a sharp perimeter for the filled areas. Triangles of different sizes, small squares, the geometric profiles of the impressed shapes — which at times recall mosaic tiles — here aggregate into dense and vibrant structures. The eye is invited to slip into and lose itself in these agglomerations, while light intercepts the reflections of the ink, making evident the physicality of the India ink deposits and the layered nature of the works. Despite the precise cadence that distinguishes the compositions, nothing appears completely static: the juxtapositions of the various stamped forms produce optical vibrations, suggest pathways and microfractures, conferring on each element a vitality only seemingly dampened by the constant use of black.
Accumulation Plan 3 / Rubberstamped china ink on paper, 60 x 76 cm / 2025
Accumulation Plan 4 / Rubberstamped china ink on paper, 60 x 76 cm / 2025
The off-grid experimentation of Accumulation Plans pushes its rubberstamps toward an almost architectural dimension. Although the subject of the series remains abstract, the resonance that can be perceived between the shapes of the stamps and the coverings of built structures allows for a figurative reading of the ink marks. Some configurations indeed seem to evoke urban maps seen from above: clusters of buildings densely packed until they almost entirely saturate the available surface, like cities designed to compress spaces, reduce distances, and alternate in rapid succession zones of shadow with areas of light. In almost all the works, however, the dense fabric of marks is interrupted by sharp white bands, zones of suspension that break the continuity of accumulation. In this possible urban metaphor, these voids take on a strong political ambiguity. They may appear as caesuras or borders, but also as breathing spaces, parks, areas subtracted from saturation. Are they accessible or exclusive territories? Shared or controlled spaces? The works do not suggest which way to lean, but allow the void to emerge as an active element of the composition.
Naturally, the historical context in which the series took shape may give rise to other interpretations. The same marks may also evoke the rubble of buildings, raw matter or residual fragments of something that has accumulated to the point of collapse. Beyond evoking the specter of aerial views of combat zones, from this perspective the series might also recall a data visualization system. In some works we may recognise a diagram of the availability of a given resource, and this inevitably brings us back to the economic reference contained in the very title of the series.
Accumulation Plan 5 / Rubberstamped china ink on paper, 60 x 76 cm / 2025
Accumulation Plan 6 / Rubberstamped china ink on paper, 60 x 76 cm / 2025
Beyond any interpretation, while transcending the customary orthogonal arrangement of previous rubberstamps, at the center of Cuttini’s research in this case too remains the imperfect concreteness of each stamp, the space that each mark subtracts from the void of the sheet. In its essence, the series confronts us with a very simple question: accumulation of what? Of matter or of void? Of presence or of absence? If the financial accumulation plan aims to guarantee an economically secure future, Accumulation Plans instead seems to interrogate the very desire to retain, preserve, stratify. To build or destroy, share or foreclose. Without the arrogance of offering answers to such questions, the eight works of the series remain faithful expressions of Mattia Cuttini’s poetics of space and permanence, ready to confront the viewer with their own questions, to affirm the irreducible value of manual work and, through the indelible traces they harbor, to bear witness to the uniqueness of a singular presence (or absence).
Accumulation Plan 7 / Rubberstamped china ink on paper, 60 x 76 cm / 2025
Art by Mattia Cuttini 2025 / Text by Chiara Braidotti May 2026 / Pictures by Giada Cattarossi
