Matteo Ciffo - Origini - Teschio 1

*CAUSA CHIUSURA LA SPEDIZIONE PARTIRA' IL GIORNO 18/06/26*

- Contemporary sculpture by Matteo Ciffo (Italy - 1987). Original title Origini - Teschio 1
- Year 2025. Edition no. 1/40 - Signed and authenticated by the artist, with certificate of authenticity
- Material: Lost-wax bronze casting
- Excellent condition


Collezione ORIGINI

Before fragmentation.
Before the architecture of memory.
Before blocks, erosions and impossible reconstructions.

Origini was born as the first contact with the archetypal matter of the human being: the skull.
Not as a symbol of death, but as a primordial structure, matrix, absolute testimony of time.

These bronze works represent the beginning of the research that would later lead to the Frammenti collection. If Frammenti investigates memory broken apart, ruin and the reconstruction of identity through geometric modules and sculptural architectures, Origini constitutes the initial core: the essential form from which everything derives.

Bronze here assumes a fundamental role.
Eternal, historical, almost ritual material, it preserves the surface like a skin worn by time.
Vertical incisions traverse the skull like temporal stratifications, sedimentations of memory, primitive traces of a language still unknown.

In Origini the form is still intact.
It has not been broken.
It has not yet become a fragment.

But it already contains everything that will come after.

The works of the Frammenti series actually originate from this initial tension:
the will to transform the classical body into a contemporary relic, to interrupt perfection through emptiness, the cube, erosion and suspension.

Origini is therefore the zero point of the research.
The ancestral matter from which the subsequent architectures of memory emerge.

Where Frammenti tells of the disintegration of identity over time, Origini still guards its primitive seed.











MATTEO CIFFO

Born in Biella in 1987, since 2007 I have developed a research focused on matter, its transformation and the memory it preserves. My work arises from a direct relationship with noble and complex materials such as marble and stone powders, natural pigments, Armenian earths, oxides and metals. I do not consider them merely expressive tools, but living presences, bearers of time, history and the possibility of rebirth.

Through a process I consider more ritual than sculptural: a rebirth of stone guided by my hand. The practice stems from observation and the desire to restore life to what has been fractured, abandoned or forgotten. Fragments and scraps, often coming from the work of other sculptors, become raw material for my works.
They are materials that already carry a history within them. I break them down and recombine them, generating forms that no longer belong to their previous state, but to a new condition. Each work emerges from a fragile balance between loss and rebirth, between memory and possibility, making visible the moment in which matter ceases to be what it was and becomes something else.

The path takes the form of a transformation that goes beyond traditional sculpture, approaching an almost alchemical dimension. I use materials that have already existed, break them down and recombine them to generate new forms and identities. Each creation arises from a tension between destruction and regeneration, between loss and memory, making visible a continuous state of change.

The research confronts materials that embody a deep contradiction: seemingly eternal and indestructible, yet at the same time sensitive and vulnerable. What seems immutable reveals an unstable nature, capable of reacting, oxidizing and transforming over time. This condition makes matter an active participant in the work, involved in a constant dialogue with time and the environment.

Perfection gives way to fragility, and eternity manifests as a living, human experience. Matter is not subordinate, but becomes co-author, preserving on the surface the traces of gesture, process and its own evolution.

Autodidact, I have built my path through experimentation, observation and listening. The approach does not aim at control, but at accompanying the material in its transformation. The resulting forms reflect the functioning of memory: structures in which fragments, traces and absences coexist and regenerate.

This practice explores matter as a living archive. The sculptures emerge as presences suspended between ruin and rebirth, between permanence and transformation, restoring to matter a deeply contemporary and human dimension.