Material: Professional printing HD with colors pigments, inks Canon Lucia EX, definition 400x1200 dpi. Fine Art Paper Moab Entrada Rag Natural 290/300 gsm
Maurizio Ciancia - Between Real and Rational by Erika Lacava
Maurizio Ciancia is a collector of pictures, a cataloger “à la Warburg” who files wonders in his camera, a modern Wunderkammer, and then looks at them again, selects them, and arranges them, once more.
An encyclopedic activity which dates back to 2016 that sorts common places as the starting point of the artist’s creation of his own Space, his Emptiness and his Fullness, by decontextualizing the original ones to finally deliver pure geometries and colours.
Places turn into non-places, anonymous spaces parted from the world of Real, whose spacial coordinates and subjects become useless, in favour of an “other” idea.
Ciancia’s artworks are no longer mirroring the reality, in fact, they represent minimal abstractions to the limit of the figurative.
By simplifying shapes and colours (two or three as a rule, often primary and contrasting), Maurizio Ciancia gets rid of any excess, following what he himself has elected as the maximum categories of the tangible.
Not only is colour, but also the vertical and horizontal planes are valorized, which seem to run after each other thus getting redefined and confusing the common perception of the viewer, and also leaving senses behind in what becomes a free games of lines.
In Ciancia’s compositions depth is missing, which enhances the “flatness” of the figurative space. It’s colours which actually recreate the different planes of the space, which is consequently split into portions following an aesthetic mode, and turning walls, buildings and road sides into a painting, a flat neutral background which becomes the scenography of the World hustle and bustle.
It’s from these spaces beyond the Real, from the whole of the inexpressed possibilities of each single shot that Ciancia started to create combinations.
Both the orthogonal and horizontal lines cooperate in order to recreate imaginary spaces, which are non necessarily real, yet possible, and as many as imagination allows.
And here is the qualitative leap forward of Ciancia's work, the maturation of his aesthetic conception that makes the spatial elements generators of lines, recomposable tesserae of a puzzle that unsettles reality and recomposes it rationally, with a view to pure aesthetics. An abstraction from the tangible towards the universal, through an inductive reasoning which gives way to a rational perspective, starting off from the everyday (purified, simplified, minimalized).
“What is rational is real, and what is real is rational”. Maurizio Ciancia, according to Hegel’s lesson, demonstrates the possible combinations of the real by juxtaposing, in a bulimia of the glance which archives and preserves everything, urban images with museum installations, architectural details with art paintings, in the name of a colour or of a shared shape. The result is an absence of meaning, from an objective point of view, for a semantics of a pure look which simply lives out of lines and colours, which recreate the Space.
