Graziano Cicoria’s approach to painting has a precise starting date: March 4, 2024, the day of his fiftieth birthday. It began by chance, almost as a game, between a father and his little daughters. Until a few months earlier, he had worked full-time for years 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 family’s country of origin.
Despite his steadily rising professional career in the business world, for years — perhaps always — he had felt a sense of inadequacy and a deep, then still unconscious, need to return to materiality and to a form of work shaped by mind, heart, and above all, hands. Rediscovering the trade of bricklaying, which he had practiced as a young man, he instinctively drew closer to the visual arts, which unexpectedly entered his life.
From an undefined need to give something back — to an emotional place, to childhood, to himself — and from a bet made after a few too many drinks during a village festival, came the unrealistic idea of creating murals in the streets of his grandparents’ town, his own town: Bonefro.
The bet was lost; however, the operational and logistical impossibility led him instead toward oil painting. He thus began painting large-scale religious scenes.
A reserved and introspective person, he transfers into his artistic research a dimension of silence, waiting, dreamlike suspension, and inner observation. His works inhabit an interrupted space between memory, dream, and historical fact, populated by enigmatic figures, symbols, and theatrical settings. His painting blends Baroque chiaroscuro, Expressionist influences, and suggestions of magical realism, giving shape to representations constructed through a psychological and narrative semantics. The gaze of his characters often becomes the emotional center of the works: suspended and silent presences crossed by a fragile and restrained tension.
Twenty-two medium- and large-format works are permanently exhibited at the Ex Convento Santa Maria delle Grazie, in the province of Campobasso. Another large-format work is exhibited at the Municipal Hall of Jelsi. Two works have become part of the collection of the Museu Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Villa Flora, in Canet de Mar.
