Michele Ciacciofera: Fragments of nature and other stories

The gallery

On the 4th of October, Senesi Contemporanea (SC) will open its space in the heart of Mayfair, London. SC is dedicated to facilitating forms of artistic research that make innovative use of traditional material or objects to redefine their cultural merit in a contemporary sense. The exhibition space is conceptualized in a way that relates the research of emerging artists with established artists, who have already gained international recognition. With its exhibition program the gallery intends to foster artists’ research, which focuses on what is always innovative in the field of the arts. Alternating between established and emerging artists within the art world, SC aims to actively support projects of research and publication that act as catalyzers for a constant growth in new ways of seeing.

The show

Senesi Contemporanea is proud to present its opening exhibition by Michele Ciacciofera, titled Fragments of nature and other stories, curated by Marco Izzolino. Presented in the show are drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations produced during and following the artist’s recent fundamental experiences this year: an audio piece titled The Density of The Transparent Wind, installed for Documenta 14 - Every time a ear di soun, in Kassel and in Athens, and the installation Janas Code presented at the Pavillon of Tradition at the 57th Venice Biennale Viva Arte Viva.

In this exhibition Michele Ciacciofera narrates his relationship with nature through the filter of his artistic practice, in which memory plays a fundamental role. To him memory constitutes a mosaic system, consenting him to manipulate time in a non-mechanical way, and to represent it beyond human limitations. Through this, Ciacciofera’s works concentrate on the accumulation, condensation and stratification of the signs of time.

Memory appears within fragments in all of his works, which have the intensity of a glare, contained, yet illuminating. One detail, or a few details accumulated, are able to activate the wake of remembrance. Each of these fragments, when set apart, surrounded by colour or indistinct materials, are relative to the totality of what they miss. They glare like a metonymy in relation to the complete meaning it symbolizes. A painting, a sculpture, albeit just a trace, is capable in inhabiting significant and meaningful signs that have demonstrative force. Distinctive details and intensive singularity function in the same way that memory resurfaces in each person by chance.

Michele Ciacciofera’s research practice is one that cannot be expressed through one definite medium; he responds in a versatile form to the necessity of putting one concrete detail in relation to a conjuncture, sometimes suggestive like a trace of an event, and other times operating through the creation of harmony (the same harmony that resurfaces in the ancestral signs that approach us in archaic cultures).

The versatile expression of Ciacciofera’s works has nevertheless a constant fulcrum - the Mediterranean - the centroid of human history in the west: a repertory of symbols, forms, myths and legends, from which his artistic practice derives a reinterpretation with a critical mindset, looking at what occurs today. His research is attentive of existing matters in his environment, both socio-anthropological and political; his gaze, connecting archaic and contemporary forms in an invisible way, maintains itself alive in the present. The memory deteriorates when it is not capable to transform itself, when it is not the origin of transformation.

Michele Ciacciofera
Fragments of nature and other stories
From the 4th October 2017 to the 4th January 2018
Opening 4th October 2017, 18 - 21.30
Exhibition and catalogue curated by Marco Izzolino

Inside the catalogue:
Text by Richard Demarco
Interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist