Despite the closure of cultural institutions in compliance with the growing global emergency, this November, Raffaele Cioffi was meant to exhibit for the first time at the MAC in Lissone, the city where the artist has developed his final years of artistic research. The exhibition, curated by Alberto Barranco di Valdivieso, is the crowning achievement of a thirty-year activity in private galleries and public institutions, both in Italy and worldwide.
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Raffaele Cioffi was born in Desio in 1971, and he currently lives and works in Milan. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera with Luciano Fabro but had the opportunity to broaden the scope of his research by closely working with masters such as Claudio Olivieri and Mario Raciti. He has exhibited in public and private institutions worldwide, through both solo and group exhibitions. The artist is currently represented by Galleria Monopoli, a modern and contemporary art gallery founded in Pavia in 1995 by the art dealer Pietro Monopoli. Given the growing necessities of an increasingly global collecting, the gallery opened a new exhibition space in Milan, which strongly promotes a dynamic selection of emerging and established artists.
Cioffi’s upcoming exhibition "Soglie 2018_2020" (Thresholds 2018_2020), presents unpublished works from the last two years alongside a series of large canvases which signal a new chapter in the artist's career and that have been specifically created for the museum’s exhibition. A body of work which embodies a great accuracy, and expresses the achievement of a profound intellectual maturity, while preserving the sensual instinct for the painting discipline that has always distinguished Cioffi’s commitment to the arts. Today, more than ever, the artist is willing to manifest his ability to interpret the language of a painting that expands in space, suggesting an extension beyond the canvas itself.
For his artistic process, Cioffi chooses an evocative and poetic direction made of color and light. By choosing soothing chromatic movements, complex pigment techniques, and forceful brush movements, Cioffi’s compositions concurrently immerse the viewer in a hyper-dimensional experience which encompasses depth and intensity. The color particles, which seem to dissolve in a perpetual and metaphysical motion, reveal themselves to the man’s eye in successive layers, unveiling mysterious oscillating "thresholds" and optical illusions in continuous movement that go beyond the physical area of the canvas.
Cioffi's research deliberately goes beyond the painting object and aims to express the passionate, ferocious, painful, even romantic desire to transcend our real dimension, in which the work and the observer exist. Raffaele Cioffi's artistic process witnesses the existence of further possibilities of imagination and understanding, not only in the man’s rational mind but in the deepest instinctive sphere, in those secret areas that only art can access. For Cioffi, painting is the driving force towards dimensions that have always been present within us and can be revealed only through the artistic process.
See here more work by Raffaele Cioffi.