mc2gallery inaugurates the last show of 2019 with a personal exhibition of the Italian artist Paolo Ciregia (1987), who lives and works in Italy. After a first-line experience in the documentation during the Russian-Ukrainian conflict 2014-15, topics such as war, political ideologies and the means of mass control remain questions on which he bases his current research. By adopting different media – installation, sculpture, photography, audio – Ciregia aims to reveal the controversies and the disquieting side of our contemporaneity.
Ciregia rethinks the bronzes of the dictators as abandoned objects starting from their private dimension and according to a vaguely esoteric vision, imagining them custodians of a dark force that emanates from their watchful small eyes, an extension of the dictator’s control in the homes of the people. In an attempt to grasp this undecipherable energy he analyses them with a scanner, with which scours them in the recesses, records the profiles, giving life to images of undefined objects, projected into the black hole of a story that has remained incomprehensible. After trying to grasp the essence he destroys them forever, or rather transforms them, merging them to give life to a new anti-monument, which chooses to show itself through the negation of the face. What happens to things once the time turns them into waste? The final work is contained in a bronze sculpture, in the form of a pomegranate seed, which determines its shape by the pressure of the other seeds inside the fruit. Its semblance of traditional and vaguely minimalist sculpture conceals the fusion, therein, of different bronze medals between busts and statues of varying dimensions, depicting the dictators of the 20th century. The depiction of the leader was the portable totem to be kept in the houses, the tutelary deity that on the one hand emphasised the adherence of the family to the political view of the regime, from the other hand a magical object that transfigured the political man into being transcendent.
In the same way, this sculpture appears as a presence in which, even in its finitude, the potential of an energy that could still be expressed through the mental effort of the spectator is preserved.
His works have been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions, including New York, London, Cardiff, Rome, Milan, Turin, Zagreb, Alicante, Venice, Bergamo, Reggio Emilia, Prato. He won important prizes, among others: Sustainable Art Prize, Ca ‘Foscari University of Venice and Art Verona Fair (2018); Winner of Talent FOAM Amsterdam 2016, winner of “LOOP, Young Italian Photographer”, European Photography Festival 2017, “honorable mention of the jury” at the Francesco Fabbri Award (2016), TU35 at the Museo Pecci in Prato 2017, winner of Leica Talent 2012.
