INSIDE RAFFAELE CIOFFI’S PAINTING
What lies beyond the threshold of our gaze? Artists like Raffaele Cioffi continue to grapple with this question — a dilemma that has challenged philosophical and intellectual minds of every era. With a painting practice capable of generating a climate of profound visual stratification through the intrinsic power of color, Cioffi activates the surface with textures that are at once dense and soft, poetic yet powerful and effective in their tangible presence as a non-figurative body. His is a painting of the surface, defining a space closely linked to the contemplation of infinitesimal transitions from one color to another, without ever becoming a mere exercise in style.
In this cycle of works, the canvas becomes a territory where an intrinsic strength is tested and made tangible — the strength of light, which constructs and disintegrates, delimits and yet opens new visual and conceptual horizons. A light that is, precisely, a threshold: a space of interconnection between us and what lies outside of us. This does not necessarily link Cioffi’s work to a mystical dimension, but rather to a discourse grounded, first and foremost, in painting itself — a painting that interrogates its own nature, expresses its own roots, and strains against them, shifting and reconfiguring the very contexts in which it manifests.
To lose oneself and to find oneself again, to move toward a possible beyond and then stop and turn back — just as our perception of the plasticity of his painting changes, so too does its chromatic temperature, shifting from bright greens to deep reds, from yellows to ochres to greys, in a continuous wandering of the palette. These breaths are infused with an active memory of art history, evoking the Color Field movement, Rothko, and Spalletti, while also touching on certain fertile moments of Analytical Painting. And yet Cioffi remains — though fully aware of history — strikingly autonomous, pursuing a dimension of research that seeks to remain steadfastly tied to the future of his own painting: beyond fashion, beyond the image, beyond any manifesto of citation.
Indeed, his work follows principles of variation on a theme, which from cycle to cycle focus on specific questions. In Beyond the Threshold, we sometimes glimpse perimeters — almost windows — that generate an inside and an outside, a perception of passage that may at times be real, yet always metaphorical within a dimension of research that presupposes both a rigorous and a gentle gaze, applied to an intimate, reserved, and even delicate practice: the practice of making painting. Silent, I retreat to paint a picture — the title of a seminal late-1970s work by Mimmo Paladino — could well serve as a subtitle here, tracing out specific paths. Together, these canvases — all of the same format — form an ideal, ever-changeable polyptych, highlighting another internal aspect of Cioffi’s painting: a kind of lyrical modularity.
The idea of a perimeter was already present in some of his early (and successful) youthful works, when canvases such as Untitled (1990) revealed a kind of painted internal frame, beginning to question that inscrutable border which belongs to both art and life — the border between the visible and the invisible.
It is in this dialectical opposition (or rather, conjunction) of opposites that Raffaele Cioffi’s painting lives. Here, the mark — unlike in early works such as those from Around the Yellow — shatters within the dense body of paint, dissolving into the chromatic magma and eventually disappearing.
Appearances and disappearances: once again, Cioffi’s painting is marked by dichotomy — but also by resistance, for today to immerse oneself in the inner depths of painting is an increasingly arduous path, one that demands not only a heightened historical and art-historical awareness, but also rigor and focus. Thus geometry, in his case, is disrupted by something vaster: a true corpo a corpo, a hand-to-hand encounter between the artist and the surface, which each time becomes a skin to be explored and negated.
From all this emerges what Marco Meneguzzo rightly defined as “the abstract visual system created by Cioffi” — a system that this new exhibition affirms with conviction. A system that, in its essence, has much to do with the very experience of existence.
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