Matteo Ciffo - Origini - Teschio 1

*DUE TO CLOSURE, THE SHIPMENT WILL DEPART ON 2026-06-18*

- 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 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 human beings: 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 Fragments collection.
If Fragments probes memory, brokenness, and the reconstruction of identity through geometric modules and sculptural architectures, Origins constitutes the initial core: the essential form from which everything derives.

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

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 Fragments series indeed originate from this initial tension:
the will to transform the classical body into a contemporary artifact, 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 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 simple expressive tools, but living presences, bearers of time, history, and the possibility of renewal.

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 give life back to what has been fractured, abandoned, or forgotten. Fragments and waste, often originating from the work of other sculptors, become the original material for my works.
They are materials that already carry a story within themselves. 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 in which matter ceases to be 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 materials that have already lived, decompose them, 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 part of the work, engaged 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.

Autodidact, I have 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 presences suspended between ruin and rebirth, between permanence and transformation, returning to matter a profoundly contemporary and human dimension.