VILLA MALPENSATA, MUSEC (SPAZIO CIELO)
MUSEC continues its investigation into the origins of creativity with a project dedicated to Roberto Ciaccio. The theme of origin runs through the entire trajectory of the Italian artist who died in 2014, in an ideal dialogue with the philosophical thought of Heidegger. In Ciaccio, the investigation into the mystery of origin is linked to the exploration of the possibilities of monochrome art: a monochrome that is only apparent, given by the superimposition of continuous transitions of colour, in which the figure is concealed and revealed beyond the image. The exhibition curated by Silvia Ciaccio with the collaboration of Nora Segreto, and set up in the Spazio Cielo of Villa Malpensata, traces Roberto Ciaccio’s path in search of the origin of the work of art, and does so with around forty works, created between 1990 and 2013. These are imposing inked iron and copper plates, worked with acidification and oxidation processes, and large chalcographies on paper. “Almost places”, where the artist has collected the traces of time, his thoughts and experiences. Roberto Ciaccio’s research resembles a path of meditation. The metal plates, the sheets of paper, the working materials offer their memory in the present; they are suspended in the dimension of the enigma and the fixity of becoming; they offer their memory in the openness of the constant process of thought and feeling. Contemporaneity is time that protects and offers its memory. Ciaccio’s works focus on spatial, perceptive and chromatic experiences that are rigorously essentialised, and for this reason, highly conceptual.
Biography
Roberto Ciaccio was born in Rome on 2 January 1951. His artistic and personal life was inextricably linked to Milan, where he spent most of his life. In Milan, he graduated in Political Science from the Catholic University with an aesthetic thesis on the psycho-social genesis of the work of art. His passion for music and philosophy accompanied his passion for art, which he began to experiment with during his university years. Since the 1980s, his work has been oriented towards pictorial abstraction of an intensely conceptual nature. The specificity and singularity of the works of Roberto Ciaccio, an intellectual artist attentive to the complexity of research in interdisciplinary terms (philosophy, music, poetry, architecture), place him in the broad contemporary art scene.
Among the many people who frequented the artist’s Milan studio in Porta Nuova and stimulated his intellectual and artistic research were the philosopher Remo Bodei, the sociologist and art scholar Pietro Bellasi, the art historian Arturo Schwarz, the gallery owner Giò Marconi, the engraver and art printmaker Giorgio Upiglio, the poet Tomaso Kemeny and the pianist Antonio Ballista.
Roberto Ciaccio passed away in Milan on 26 November 2014, after a short illness.
