Matteo Ciffo - Origini - Teschio 1

*CLOSED CAUSE THE SHIPMENT WILL DEPART ON 18/06/26*

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



OrIGINI Collection

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

Origins comes into being as the first contact with the archetypal matter of human beings: the skull.
Not as a symbol of death, but as an primal structure, matrix, absolute testimony of time.

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

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

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

But it already contains everything that will come after.

The works of the Fragments series indeed 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.

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

Where Fragments tells of the disintegration of identity over time, Origins still keeps its primitive seed.











MATTEO CIFFO

Born in Biella in 1987, since 2007 I have developed 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 mere expressive tools, but living presences, bearers of time, history and possibilities of rebirth.

Through a process I regard as more ritual than sculptural: a rebirth of stone guided by my hand. The practice grows from observation and the desire to give life back to what has been shattered, abandoned or forgotten. Fragments and scraps, often from the work of other sculptors, become the primary material for my works.
They are materials that already carry a history within them. I break them down and reassemble 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 when 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 lived, break them down and reassemble 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 part of the work, involved in a constant dialogue with time and the environment.

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

Autodidact, I built my path through experimentation, observation and listening. The approach is not about control, but about 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 suspended presences between ruin and rebirth, between permanence and transformation, returning to matter a deeply contemporary and human dimension.