Graziano Cicoria’s artistic journey can be traced to a specific date: March 4, 2024, the day of his fiftieth birthday. It began by chance, almost as a game, between a father and his young daughters. Until a few months earlier, he had spent years working full-time in planning, budgeting, and business development for a major German corporate group.
Cicoria left Italy in 1996 at a very young age, first moving to Belgium, then to England, Germany, and finally Spain, without ever severing the nostalgic and dreamlike bond with his homeland.
Despite a steadily rising professional career in the corporate world, for years—perhaps always—he had felt a sense of inadequacy and a deep, though still unconscious, need to return to the tangible world and to a form of work shaped by mind, heart, and, above all, hands. Rediscovering the trade of bricklaying, which he had practiced in his youth, he instinctively drew closer to the visual arts, which entered his life unexpectedly.
From an undefined need to give something back—to a place of memory, to childhood, to himself—and from a bet made after a few too many drinks during a village festival, came the seemingly impossible idea of creating murals in the streets of his grandparents’ town, his own town: Bonefro.
The bet was lost; however, the practical and logistical impossibility of the project led him instead toward oil painting. He thus began creating large-scale religious compositions.
A reserved and introspective individual, Cicoria brings to his artistic practice a dimension of silence, waiting, dreamlike suspension, and inner observation. His works inhabit an intermediate space between memory, dream, and historical reality, populated by enigmatic figures, symbols, and theatrical settings. His painting combines Baroque chiaroscuro, Expressionist influences, and echoes of magical realism, giving form to images constructed through a deeply psychological and narrative language. The gaze of his characters often becomes the emotional center of the work: suspended and silent presences marked by a fragile and restrained tension.
Twenty-two medium- and large-scale works are permanently exhibited at the Ex Convento Santa Maria delle Grazie, in the province of Campobasso. Another large-scale work is on permanent display in the Municipal Hall of Jelsi. Two works have entered the collections of the Museu Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Villa Flora in Canet de Mar.
This late yet intense encounter with painting has developed into a coherent artistic practice, rooted in memory, identity, and the search for meaning through images.
