Matteo Cibic – Paradiso Dreams

Technical Information

Catalog of the exhibition, Palazzo Podestarile - Montelupo - 30.11.2019-27.01.2020

This is how we could define Matteo Cibic, borrowing the title that he himself has chosen for one of the sections in which he structured the Paradiso Dreams exhibition. The oneironaut is the lucid dreamer, he is the one who knows how to navigate the galaxy of dreams while remaining awake, the one who manages to explore and modify his own dream landscape at will. This is how Cibic works: he is a conscious visionary, an artist who knows how to translate something intangible and impalpable like dreams into something material, physical and tangible like ceramics. His pieces are always hybrids: they mix Pinocchio's noses and Magritte's clouds, the memory of certain zoomorphic characters from Walt Disney with that of Morandi's vases and bottles, the tradition of great ceramic craftsmanship with the Dadaist mockery. You look at one of his artifacts, any one, and you feel that it comes from afar, perhaps even from the ithyphallic decorations of ancient civilizations, yet at the same time you feel it contemporary, you feel that it dialogues with our time, and that it introjects into the present, into taste and sensibility of today, techniques, knowledge and languages ​​of centuries and centuries ago. In this lies his originality, what makes him unique even among the most creative designers of his generation: the ability to generate short circuits of meaning, and to create shapes that did not exist before he invented them, but with echo and the memory of the forms generated by previous generations. As paradoxical as it may seem, with him even ceramics seem to be made with the same material that dreams are made of.
Silvana Annicchiarico, curator

Leading exponent of contemporary design culture, Matteo Cibic works at the crossroads between design, art and high craftsmanship. Growing up in a family with strong design traditions, he has developed an experimental approach that leads him to research materials, shapes and production techniques. He has been working on ceramics for over twenty years, with a visionary and highly innovative outlook. His works are exhibited in some of the main museums in the world.