Elvio Chiricozzi
RITROVERAI LE NUBI
Clouds are a recurrent theme in Chiricozzi’s most recent works. He never gives in to the artifices of a Baroque or decorative style but rather tends toward an increasing coherence, without any type of caesura, moving through the use of a variety of techniques and materials. Each sky, each cloud, whether placed on a wall or on the floor, blocks in time a single, unrepeatable atmospheric instant in our sky. For the artist, clouds are both manifestation of Nature and acts of thought. They are the artistic form of mental aspiration, daydreams triggered by life. Clouds take shape if many of their elements, writes Lucretius in De Rerum Natura(1st century BC), flying high in the sky at a certain point come together […] held together by air. In this way they first form small clouds and then these join to become more and more numerous. They grow continuously and these are blown about by the wind which transforms them into a violent storm (Book VI, 3). And the large work entitled, Nulla è rimasto immutato fuorché le nuvole (Nothing is unchanged except the clouds, 2015) portrays precisely a “violent storm” the baleful meteorological variable that strikes without apparent reverses of dynamism. Once again the title contains a literary reference, this time to a quote found in Walter Benjamin’s Esperienza e povertà (Experience and poverty, 1933) written following the destruction of World War I and the ascent of the Nazi-Fascist regime.
120 pages
color offset, letterpress sleeve
cm 17x24
120 pages
language: ita/eng
First Edition
London 2016
ISBN TBD
Exhibition: London - July, 1 2016 / October, 8 2016
ARTIST INFO
Elvio Chiricozzi
Born in Viterbo in 1965, he started exhibiting in 1989. He participated in many exhibitions in both public and private spaces, among which: Museo Laboratorio dell’Università La Sapienza, Rome (1994); XII Quadriennale d’Arte, Rome (1996); Museo Risorgimento, Rome (1999); Fori Imperiali, Rome (1999); Museum of Modern Art, Ostend (2001); Vasby Konsthall, Stockholm (2001); European Parlament, Brussels (2003); Ministero degli Affari Esteri italiano, Rome (2004); X Biennale di Architettura, Venice (2006); Fondazione Volume!, Rome (2010); Casa delle letterature, Rome (2010); Castello di Rivara (2011); Muséè d’Art Moderne et Contemporain,Saint Etienne (2015) .His work is part of the permanent collection of the United Nations in Geneva. In 2013 he realized a permanent site-specific installation for the Castello di Rivara, curated by Franz Paludetto.
The most recent works are inspired by natural phenomena to deal with existential issues.
In Ciò che non muta (2010) the drama of adolescence, which mainly regards the communication of the uncertain or undecided states of consciousness, becomes openness to the possible and to the lightness, as it happens in the enchantment of the composition and recomposition of joyful groups of birds in flight. The work takes up a theme which was beloved from the ancient philosophy and the artist’s interests: the study of the moment in which the sign ceases to be matter, trace of a rub or deposit of a pigment, to become communication and beauty through the language.
With the series Ritroverai le nubi (2013) the Chiricozzi’s thought focuses on the basic dimension of the event, with the observation of phenomena that are constantly changing, but without giving up their identity. The clouds are a metaphor of our being, where the attention towards the world makes us kaleidoscopic, while the identity does not change.