Matteo Ciffo - Origini - Teschio 2

*CLOSING CAUSE SHIPMENT WILL BE SENT ON 18/06/26*

- Contemporary sculpture by Matteo Ciffo (Italy - 1987). Original Title Origins - Skull 2
- Year 2025. Edition no. 1/40 - Signed and authenticated by the artist, with certificate of authenticity
- Material: Lost-wax bronze casting
- Excellent condition



Origins Collection

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

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

These bronze works represent the beginning of the research that would later lead to the Frammenti collection.
While Frammenti investigates broken memory, 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 plays a fundamental role here.
Eternal, historical, almost ritual material, it preserves the surface as a skin worn by time.
The vertical incisions traverse the skull like temporal stratifications, 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 a fragment.

But it already contains everything that will come after.

The works of the Frammenti series indeed arise from this initial tension:
the will to transform the classical body into a contemporary relic, to interrupt perfection through void, 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 Frammenti tells the disintegration of identity over time, Origins still guards 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 the possibility of rebirth.

Through a process I consider more ritual than sculptural: a rebirth of the stone guided by my hand. The practice stems from observation and the desire to restore life to what has been shattered, abandoned or forgotten. Fragments and scraps, often derived from other sculptors’ work, become raw material for my pieces.
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 when matter stops being what it was and becomes something else.

The path takes the form of a transformation that surpasses traditional sculpture, approaching a quasi-alchemical dimension. I use substances that have already had an existence, break them down and recombine them to generate new forms and identities. Each creation is born 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, leaving on the surface traces of gesture, process and its own evolution.

Self-taught, I have built my path through experimentation, observation and listening. The approach is not aimed at control, but at accompanying the material in its transformation. The resulting forms reflect how memory works: 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, returning to matter a deeply contemporary and human dimension.