Umberto Ciceri was born in 1961 in Milan and now lives and works in Barcelona.

After his early studies in art and fashion design, he has been for decades a prolific creative and Art Di­rector for the collections of textile, print and embroidery of the majors fashion firms such as Versace, Moschino, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Armani, Chanel, Hermés, Gucci, among others.

Active in the art world since 2007, he cultivates his creativity around patterns and textures, developing his personal research on neurophysiology and colours atomic physics.

Ciceri’s artistic practice is divided into two main axes, different in content and representation techniques. One has social purposes and uses sound installations, video projections and performance. The other is based on neuroaesthetic studies, a personal evolution of kinetic technique which gets people to move in front of the work in a ritual perceptive of temporal coincidence, named Hypertrait.

The constant element in the video installations is the association and ambiguity between the high defi­nition of the text to be read and the low definition of the images to be watched. The artist records with an HD video camera but purposely films out of focus, encouraging an emotional contrast between the descriptive logic of the words in focus and the logic of the sensation in the blurry films: the entire work indeed hinges on these ethical and aesthetic ambiguities.

In the works based on neuroaesthetic studies, “moving” in antithesis to immobility acquires an existential meaning: regeneration against stasis, the Passage has risen to evolutional model. The shifted motion of the spectators is thus the motion of the works in which they are reflected. This plunges into the substance of seeing, extracted chromatic core samples, millimetre by millimetre, from the main body of the images to the search for the indivisible, balance out the optical and kinetic representations, which reverberate on the surface of our vision.

A walkthrough through the labyrinthine abstractions of every common existence dominated by fate en­hance the wonder and the hidden drama behind every provisional state of harmony.

Umberto Ciceri is represented by international galleries, took part in the 54th Venice Biennale of Art in the Italian Pavilion, and his works are in prestigious private collections around the world.

VIDEOS

SPIN LIFE (motion is an illusion just as stillness is an illusion) “Work Filmed”

LUMINOSI

MAKING OF

HUMAN Fights Rights Lights

HUMAN Fights Rights Lights – Video triology of 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights

HUMAN Fights Rights Lights (extended version)

OCTOBER 30th

VERSICOLOURED CHOREOGRAPHY is a walkthrough guided loosely, step by step, along the labyrinthine abstractions of every common existence dominated by fate.

The steps of a resourceful choreography which walks us through the event horizons of the Ballerina: revealing the chromatic spectrum of the declining possibilities within each one of us.

The intimate fabric of its nature and the immanence of the transcendental.

Because the artwork is the mask (the persona according to Latins) which allows us “to see” the hero-fatality of our existence, as Perseus saw the reflection of Medusa the gorgon on his reflective shield in order to fight her and kill her.

The shifted motion of the spectators is thus the motion of the works in which they are reflected, to the point where we no longer know which is which: we are all swept up in a magic choreography which, by the power of Art, plunges us into the tableaux ivre of living, even if only for a moment.

It is perpetual like Umberto Ciceri’s study which starts over again and again from the point at which it appeared to finish, and keeps spreading out in ever increasing spirals.

Because we are all dancing a versicoloured choreography, some awkwardly and some gracefully, simply awaiting love, death and apotheosis.

Angelo Mancini Gorenc

VIDEOS

SPIN LIFE (motion is an illusion just as stillness is an illusion) “Work Filmed”

LUMINOSI

MAKING OF