Artist: Diego Cibelli

Alfonso Artiaco gallery presents the second solo exhibition of Neapolitan artist Diego Cibelli (Naples, 1987) entitled Un vuoto che non ha luogo.

The exhibition project unfolds in the gallery rooms, like a circular fable in six episodes. The first two rooms, È nato Generosity and Metamorfosi, explore the theme of birth, interweaving cultural and scientific perspectives. From here, the route proceeds into dreamlike territories: Storie per farlo dormire presents a music box that interweaves visual references, juxtaposing styles and epochs, symbologies and inventions; conversely, Enigma, proposes an immersion into the mysterious and sometimes impervious spaces of consciousness. In this journey, the room Beata fragilità becomes the place where an attempt is made to name and make visible the shadows that disturb the human soul. Finally, the enigma is resolved in the last room, which takes its title from the exhibition: Un vuoto che non ha luogo.

From the critical text by Sylvain Bellenger in the exhibition catalogue:

Un vuoto che non ha luogo tells a story. It is the story of an artist who emerged from the Arte Povera revolt that aesthetically, intellectually and morally dominated education and artistic circles still in the 1910s. Diego Cibelli was then a student and lived, as he still does today, in Scampia. An artist coming from a now well-normalised break and from a district in Naples whose very name evokes everything that building speculation, society, housing density and rationalist town planning, sometimes mixed with violence, have been able to invent. ‘Scampia without anger’ says Diego. It was this urban environment that inspired his first metamorphoses. For Diego, belonging to a place, whatever it may be, is the most delicate and important part of being human. It is the founding concept of his practice.

Porcelain is almost human,’ says Diego, ’it brings with it an abundance of fusion forms whose generosity and profusion are unprecedented. Everywhere there is abundance, generosity, surprise, virtuosity and skill to marvel at. From the very first room, the animals presented by Diego seem to be talking beings, but they say nothing. It is the fable that sets the tone, but it is not Aesop, La Fontaine, Giambattista Basile or the Roman de Renard. It is fun and childhood, that of all children, as if the artist were an adult who had not renounced childhood, an intrinsic quality of art. Biscuit prefers the oneiric, and Diego’s humanised and sometimes metamorphosed animals do not refer to the animal tradition of Joachim Kändler in Meissen, for example, but take us back to the world of fairy tales, shadows and silhouettes, like the figures cut out with large scissors by Andersen or the hybrid monsters of the fantastic medieval bestiary.

For Diego, as for Anna Maria Ortese in The Port of Toledo, the sea is an important element of Neapolitan identity, a constant in the territory he seeks to express. It is not so much the seascape that is incorporated into his poetics, but the mysteries inspired by the drawings of what had never been seen before in the extraordinary diagrams of one of the great apostles of Darwinism, Ernest Haeckel, master of Anton Dohrn, who tried to find the origin of life in the waters of the Bay of Naples at the Naples Maritime Station. Transposed, transformed, enlarged and mutated into porcelain, his drawings of marine invertebrates, radiolarians, sponges, corals, jellyfish and synophobes, which had revolutionised marine biology, show the incredible extravagances to which nature and life had indulged. They seem to belong to another planet, that of dreams and transformations that other works by Diego also borrow from the earth and its mythologies.

Diego Cibelli (Naples, 1987) lives and works in Naples

Diego Cibelli was the winner of the 2024 edition of the Prix Carta Bianca. Also in 2024, he participated in the first edition and won the CARUSO Prize. In 2022 he participated in the International Biennial of Ceramic Art in Jingdezhen, China. In February 2021, he inaugurated Feed Me with Domestic Stuff, a solo exhibition at the LAB.oratorio space of the Made in Cloister Foundation. In April 2021, he inaugurated two solo shows at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte: L’Arte del Danzare Assie- me and Gates at the Real Fabbrica. In 2019, he had an art residency in Buenos Aires organised by the IGAV Institute and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Argentina. The residency ended with a solo exhibition at the Argentine Cultural Institute. In 2018, he participated in the exhibition Mine at the Bagni Misteriosi di Porta Venezia in Milan. In 2016 he exhibited at the MSU Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and in 2013 at the Kunsterhaus Bethanien in Berlin. His work is in the collections of museums such as the MAD Museum of Art and Design in New York and the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte.