The gallery Martina Kaiser is pleased to showcase with „Blurring Time“ new works from Italian artist Umberto Ciceri. Besides his iconic ballerinas the exhibition will present new installations of the “Millimeters”-cycle which furthermore create a revolutionary visual experience due to the lenticular technique in his oeuvre.
The title “Blurring Time” is Mr. Ciceri’s reference to the golden age of classical art where the aureole as nimbus of the divine was the only canonical legitimized blurry element in painting. And thereby a precursor for the later resolution of forms and contours that arose in the late 19. century becoming a predominant style in painting for the future. On top the title can be interpreted as a comment on recent times; the way of the world seemed and still seems to be so unpredictable since the last months and weeks, simply blurry and unstable.
Hypnotic, powerful and a little enigmatic: At first sight the mural installations of Umberto Ciceri have the allure of hyper realistic paintings. But with each approach and movement of the beholder the motives start to rotate and oscillate, yet changing their shapes. Ballerinas turn around in full 360 degree, a dove seems to rise from the ground spreading its wings and monochrome color fields start to dance. With their blurry appearance it seems that Umberto Ciceri’s works are coated with a soft-focus gaze giving them an aura of scattered radiation and slight dizziness. And that’s exactly what he declared as his esthetic core. Instead of a sharp focus, precise alignements and clear boundaries that may express austerity following an authoritarian concept, he focuses sequential thresholds and prefers to fathom the optical periphery. By this he generates the illusion of movement and liveliness of his figures. His installations are literally moving images that infatuate with their ethereal allure and their formal indeterminacy forming subjects out of blending color mists and figurative elements. In fact the beholder faces mobile visual clues instead of stiff tableaus which he has to refocus permanently in order to deduce the pictorial proceeding. Being a fusion of film sequences and manual lenticular technique Umberto Ciceri’s works dispose of a unique character based on his high expertise about optics and visual processes. (Yorca Schmidt-Junker)
Umberto Ciceri lives and works both in Barcelona and Bologna. The Italian born artist is a graduate textile designer with a diploma from the Milan Academy of Arts & Design. During his activities in the fashion business he started to study optics, the chemical structure of colors and neurophysiological processes in reception which formed the basis of his later career as an artist. Since then he is renowned as one of the leading experts in manual lenticular technique. His works were showcased in the USA, Singapore, Hongkong, Dubai, Turkey etc. and can be found in various private collections all over the world. In 2011 he took part at the 54. Biennale of Venice for the Italian pavilion, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi. With the patronage of Amnesty International he implemented the exhibition „Human Fights Right Lights“ at the historical Reggia di Caserta in 2018.
