Michel Rein Gallery is pleased to present Michele Ciacciofera’s first solo
exhibition. The Library of Encoded Time is the third part of a trilogy devised by Ciaccofera, which questions the relation of signs to matter and memory. The first part, The Translucent Skin of the Present, made at the Vitamin Gallery in Guangzhou in 2018, was followed by A Chimerical Museum of Shifting Shapes, made at the Voice Gallery in Marrakesh.
The works created for this show, planned as a whole, in which each piece
resonates with the next, are the result of a twofold line of thinking about
both the erosion and saturation of memory, as well as its creative rekindling. Sculptures placed on the floor and on shelves, mural grids, rods leaning against a wall, works on canvas and paper, all appear like fantasized archaeological objects, installed as if in a real excavation site, “edified” using local elements, like bricks and grids. As in his similar earlier installations made in Marrakesh and Guangzhou, Ciacciofera uses kinds of shelves covered with signs, inspired by cuneiform tablets and undeciphered ancient alphabets, local bricks, and “earth” clay from France. In a process designed to rekindle their memory, he carries out an initial firing which “cleanses” the object’s past, and carries on with the task of the craftsman preceding him with forms of writing, made with needles from the pharmaceutical industry, pigments and water, prior to a second firing. Set on the floor, these bricks forming the library called The Library of Encoded Time follow a specific order, as in an archaeological site, tracing a sort of grid with solids and voids, in a rhythm which also suggests a “loss”.
See it at galerie Michel Rein, Paris, until April 6th.