Caterina Ciuffetelli returns at the Forzani Gallery with her latest solo show “Imperfect Order“; a careful selection of works that from 2017 properly frame its latest production.
There is an eternally open question that haunts the minds of scientists and artists alike, inscrutable as bewitching is wearing by constitution, Time. Buying almost economic value time is spent but never manages to be evaluated or bartered in any way. This leads us to look for a bargaining chip so precious that we can get one more portion, a moment. The work of art is one of the rare materialities that can get closer to this need, Art which even can be consummated keeping us forever bound to that doubt about the reason for the artist’s creation, even better the creative idea that moves it, brings the artist closer to the aforementioned moment.
Caterina Ciuffetelli, in her own way, participates in this research, in her studio she holds the secret of the signs which she forms one by one and that become the cells of the finished work. The time required for a complete execution is eternally varied, each frottage is carried out without haste but necessarily.
The three series showed in the exhibition are memories themselves of different moments. The Prehistoric series is a reference to past civilizations marks but yet holds in itself an extremely contemporary look at the eternally open question of language and its interpretation. The traces of this series mix up issues related to communication with purely aesthetic and signical ones, the meaning of these is made less essential by the formal rendering of the work and by the layers of the material, they become an integral part of history, essential in their illegibility.
During one of our meetings we ended up relentlessly talking about the Lascaux Cave Graffiti, although not because these were the source of inspiration for her works but for how much they could have been a motivation to the temporal stratification and symptoms of the events that led to the conception of her last works.
In the Diagram series we read that path that the artist inevitably paces to arrive at the last production. The material stratification becomes more dense while a more linear structure appears looking back at the previous works; a reference to a scheme that however does not order, perhaps a more programmed research and a desire to exercise on the time taken to realize the work itself, an essential element to read the Mosaic series, in which the essential sumbols placed next to each other are no longer read as mysterious communication marks but as temporal pieces. The works become a description of an incessant flow, the stratification is no longer only hinted at and feeble but almost forced, pushed or extrapolated as only light can facilitate total reading.
Caterina leaves her mark using signs that are extremely personal, hers and no one else’s. She expresses her presence to us, she may reiterates that it is not important to know if Time has already passed or if it is forgetting us but urges us to leave traces of ourselves; with the most concrete actions or the most ephemeral testimonies we attend ourselves to shape the temporal layers and the work of art is often to leave a residue, it is aspiring to total Time through the instant, it is asking for immortality.
Lorenzo Rubini
IMPERFECT ORDER
I intend talking about the attempt to give order to chaos and about the entropy of reality. I use a transitory, undefined and imperfect reference system such as the grids in DIAGRAM, or the hive cell sequences of tesserae in MOSAIC.
Reality is chaotic, entropic, incomprehensible, thrown together and sometimes horrific. Through my art I try to veil this horror and offer formal answers in its stead. In “We are not islands”, a work composed of hundreds of cellotex balls placed side by side, I speak of the union that generates strength, and at the same time insert the composition into a rectangle that becomes an island unto itself. That is to state that our response to chaos can often be contradictory, structurally incomplete or evanescent. Existence is a precarious and fluctuating sea while all the footholds are risky and fleeting. The only certainty is fluidity. Any attempts at structured order cannot be but inaccurate responses.
I express the concept of time via the chosen methodology. The repetitive scanning of the juxtaposed MOSAIC tiles speak of an abstract, frozen, ascetic, zen time in an attempt to create a time within time, a time where art finds a space of welcoming residence. Another time. An altered time. Everything slows down to find peace in an order that, although unstable, offers the momentary comfort of a port at sea.
Caterina Ciuffetelli