Varcare la soglia

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…

Varcare la soglia Lorenzo Madaro

Cosa c’è oltre la soglia del nostro sguardo? Gli artisti come Raffaele Cioffi continuano a interrogarsi attorno a questo dilemma che sprona le menti filosofiche e intellettuali di ogni tempo. Con una pittura in grado di generare un clima di profonda stratificazione visuale attraverso la forza intrinseca del colore, Cioffi sollecita la superficie con texture…

Soglia

Essay: Marco Meneguzzo
Language: Italian, English
Size: cm 24×17
Pages: 60
Illustrations: 23
Year: 2023

Marco Meneguzzo

ARS GRATIA ARTIS

In an era where even in art the main purpose is to strike the eye with immediately astonishing images, it may seem strange that there are artists who ask their interlocutor to slow down, pay attention, depth, constancy, intellectual participation, visual intelligence, and contemplation. Yet they exist, they are not few, and almost all of them practice some form of abstraction, a term that can range from the most hermetic conceptualism to the more traditional pictorial abstractionism, as it came to be specified during the first seventy years of the twentieth century. Raffaele Cioffi is among the latter.

Carlo Franza

LA LUCE LIBERATA

La luce cresce fra soglie e passaggi, entra lentamente e si spinge nell’aria delle stanze ideali. Quella di Raffaele Cioffi potrebbe sembrare una pittura destinata a un gusto prezioso dell’occhio, invece bisogna avvertire la profonda necessità di filtrare il reale in questa sottile consistenza di una pittura che è riflesso di una disposizione mentale adatta a sciogliere gli ingorghi confusi della natura su uno schermo di trepide intuizioni.

Alberto Barranco di Valdivieso

La pittura che si muove di Alberto Barranco di Valdivieso La forza della pittura. Raffaele Cioffi ha sempre dimostrato un istinto “sensuale” per la disciplina della pittura. Formatosi all’Accademia di Brera nei primi anni Novanta dapprima con Luciano Fabro, artista concettuale dai paradigmi severi, e successivamente scegliendo percorsi didattici diversi, ha dimostrato già nei primi…

Alberto Barranco di Valdivieso

BEYOND THE THINGS OF REALITY. A DISCOURSE ON RAFFAELE CIOFFI’S PAINTINGS

Analytical painting and post-analytical painting: a necessary transition.

In 1990, Raffaele Cioffi enters the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. After his first year attending the course, he understands that, for him, there is an urgency to apprehend and carry out a “real” pictorial research; it was stronger than just following the conceptual line of his teacher Luciano Fabro, one of the founders of Arte Povera. At that time this was a subject which still had great cultural impact on the Italian art world and, together with Transavanguardia, it was probably the main art wave of greatest relevance in the most important commercial and exhibition channels. Therefore he decided to abandon the lure of a route that perhaps would have been easier to follow but that did not convince the young artist from Desio to leave the path of painting.