Variations cinétiques 1, 2023

Piero Cipolat  

Piero Cipolat is an Italian artist who chooses to use various materials to find new technical and artistic solutions.

Kandinsky, Malevitch, Mondrian then the Bauhaus and other movements such as Minimal Art, Concrete Art led him to create works with different materials in a constant questioning and research. Profoundly Mahdist, he advocates an art freed from its shackles, playful, inventive and always in the making.

Africa, the country of his birth, also greatly influenced him: this African culture remained in his heart and which he was imbued with (such as the Shoowa rugs with their geometric patterns which he considers to be the precursors of kinetics) and him made it possible to create and reinvent forms.

He always wanted to create this resonance between Africa and the West, this clash between these two cultures. Africa influenced him, that's for sure; the same goes for Western culture.

He must have been about ten years old when he arrived in Venice where he discovered this open-air museum. The same sensations were revealed in Rome. In the field of art history, it all starts with artists like Giotto, Masaccio then, of course, the renaissance with Veronese, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael... who allowed him to discover this beauty art with a climax during his meeting with an Arlesian woman by Van Gogh.

The triangle, the square, the circle, the line and the curve are his palette to create a new imaginary world, to transform space and color. He works on the notions of transparency, light, reflections and distortions to alter perception and appeal to the senses. He seeks to find a continuous movement beyond the visual, to destabilize the confrontation between the gaze and the object, between the spectator and the work, and thus create an interaction between these 2 poles through the use of flat structures, concaves, convexes, mobile or removable articulated planes...

For the sculptures, the work on the space is quite complex. The work must be able to fully integrate into different places, whether it is a gallery, installations in an urban environment or in nature. It must recreate a space within space. Concerning the public, the quest is always to find and create an interaction with the spectator so that he can appropriate the work. It is the equation between time, object, space and the viewer that gives the work its own existence. The “Messages" sculptures perfectly illustrate this appropriation and bring a new symbolic, social and participatory dimension.

In his works in Altuglass, light intervenes on the objects and their environment. It no longer only has a dogmatic lighting function, but participates fully in the creation of a new space. It penetrates into transparencies and bounces off signs and materials. She communicates with objects by creating light and dark, colored and transparent spaces. It gives rise to shadows, traces of reality that invade the work and even encroach on its environment. The effects obtained generate illusions of movement and make the work appear in 3 dimensions.

Likewise for digitized works, he first creates a matrix which he deconstructs then studies its shapes, colors, distortions and possible variations to create a new illusion.

The metamorphosis takes place through the movement of the spectator, in his change of point of view, to arrive at two visions of the world, one objective and the other imaginary. This confrontation is the essential element to give the object total freedom and thus create the illusion.

It's about creating, inventing new shapes, new materials, new techniques. Expand this great palette of infinite possibilities to animate color and shape to provoke a new aesthetic and a new way of dealing with reality.

We find this approach in all his works, whether sculptures, Plexiglas, digitized works or works on canvas worked with materials or others.

To conclude, Piero Cipolat is the result of a crossbreeding between Western art and primitive arts. However, the artist insists on the fact that understanding and seeking to explain art is not a reason in itself and he thinks that one should not always seek to reveal this rare mystery of life that art proposes to us and leaves us as a heritage.