LIGHT SCREENS
Looking at an artwork is not a simple action: the viewer has to totally abandon itself to the vision with no time limit, leaving it to the endless possibilities of what could happen. This ascetical approach is even more effective while contemplating the profound and obscure brightness of Raffaele Cioffi’s canvases, meticulously collected in this exhibition curated by LM Gallery. The title is itself explanatory, a clear statement that recalls the latest production of the artist career within a five year span. Without any redundancy, these works help us explore the world of Raffaele Cioffi through the non casual juxtaposition of chromas, lights, shadows, traces emerging out of the surface and rarefied abysses. Indeed the quality of abstract painting allows us to totally abandon ourselves while encountering the artwork. Although the purpose of abstraction is to sway from tangible and real elements these canvases dig out their soul: it is the emotion given by the colour, the pure chromatic pleasure and the wise combination of each shade: the green, declined in the most charming tones, the cobalt blue, the colours of the earth, the sun and of minerals merge in delicate shades which give prominence to the colour experimentation and to its temperatures.
The works of the series called “Sipario”, monumental in size and in solemnity, embrace the tradition of abstraction painting, putting an accent on the artist gesture, the color consistency and the appreciation of pure painting. However the chromatic areas flake off giving way to suggestive effects of light variation and then get interrupted by more shiny and human pourings.The abrupt irruption of the most vital component in painting is the tear that creates a connection between the viewer and the art, between the soul of the artist and our interiority. The sign is gesture always present in his paintings, although apparently it could not seem so evident: in “Sipario” and “Continuum” cycle of works here exhibited, it is possible to notice the vertical “scratches” which give life to the painting, an imperceptible trembling of the human hand.These details, unveil the will of the artist to sign his artworks with a silent and fluxing style. The spirituality of the artist is a sentiment that storms through his works, can be perceived in each artwork but becomes more tangible in the series “Alla luce della croce” shown in this exhibition as a completion of the abstract landscape, a key to the ultimate purpose of the artist, his will to research the most intimate essence an artist can draw from an artwork. Those fading candid crosses illuminate the black background, generating an allegorical image of the faith saving from fears and the human soul gloom. Thanks to a multi-sense experience which suggest a sense of calm and silence, Raffaele Cioffi urges us to reflect over this modern frenzy times, fighting it through it painting that owe much to the tradition. The canvas is again the elected medium, chromas and lights the protagonists and the emotional impact the eventual result. Lightscreens is a manifesto of Cioffi’s latest production, an art breathing life from all of its pores, modern and glowing, light years away from the gloom and doom expressed by the mortality of Mark Rothko’s paintings, whereas the reference would seem evident.
It is a return to the symbolic and mythic dimension of the painting area, declined to an abstraction which is either lyrical and luminous.
