Celebrating CUBO's ten years of activity , seven of the artists belonging to the Group's artistic heritage have been called to participate in an ideas competition for the design and realisation of a piece of work capable of generating in a simple, original and immediate way a strong identification with the founding values of the Unipol Group and with CUBO's identity and image, to what it stands for and has stood for in its 10 years, enhancing its most characterising aspects.
Stefano Ronci is awarded the creation of the work DiecialCUBO for the 10-year anniversary of CUBO 2023 with the following reason:
"in the design of the work DiecialCUBO, Stefano Ronci has combined contemporary languages, materials and forms, creating a piece that is a container and source of the culture of its own time, of which the artist is the medium.
Its proposal looks at the possible and exponential development of CUBO's activities; it does so with the use of mirroring materials that are inclusive and require a direct relationship with the user; it does so with a numerical formula since, today more than ever, numbers translate words and can express concepts of the present.
Metaphorically, the project calls on the work to reflect CUBO's heritage of activities and people, shifting the focus from the work to the environment in which it is included, and thereby triggering a communicative and dialectical register directed outwards.
By interacting, the work produces varied narratives, always vital, on which the materials, mirrored resins and blown neon generate present and future imagery and place it along that liminal border between art and design where the encounter between artists and companies can take place today".
The panel of judges also awards 2 special mentions to the projects Senza titolo by Lidia Bagnoli
for the commitment identified in CUBO'S studio and activities and In a Nutshell by Alessandro Lupi for its originality and conceptual power.
"Recurring elements appear in the continuous ramification of materials and forms that Stefano Ronci has chosen and knows how to shape in his artistic investigation: the work on the degrees of the visible through experimentation with reflecting, translucent, diaphanous and transparent materials, as we can see in the piece Piccolo Manifesto sul Futuro (Small Manifesto on the Future) , already in the Unipol collections, or in the more recently created purely pictorial works, such as Paesaggi Molli (Soft Landscapes), extending into the environment and welcoming the space with folds and concavities where the material is moulded like plastic and integrated with architecture; his research on signs understood as traces, persistent or fleeting, of a journey of human beings and their memory, in an era of stratification and surfacing of language; the establishment of a relationship between self and other, the desire to scrutinise and probe the mystery and power of communication between people and the environment; all processed by a playful irony and a marked sensitivity found in the choice of always making the work incomplete or maybe requiring viewers to use their sensitivity.
These elements also appear and stand out in the DiecialCUBO project that the Panel of Judges of the CUBO Tenth Anniversary Prize declared to be the winner, recognising in this work Stefano Ronci's ability to combine and integrate contemporary languages, materials and forms, making the work a fluid and osmotic container of relationships, a crystal-clear paradigm and yet an open container of the Museum's values: memory, protection, future, and sharing.
Ronci is a multifaceted artist who has always managed to work both inside and outside the art world, integrating his knowledge with the cultural expressions of society and with the narrative needs of the company for which the work of art is a vehicle.
DiecialCUBO, whose title sounds like a mathematical formula, acts as an invitation to gather, to enhance imagination and becomes a metaphor for the potential inherent in CUBO's programme; it plays with the forms and formulas, strategies and possibilities emerging from a museum that is a laboratory open to all and for all.
In an era such as this, where numbers are required to translate words and express concepts, where dialogue questions the limits and boundaries of the virtualisation of reality, including works of art, increasingly the object of dematerialisation and intangibility, DiecialCUBO declares that numbers are to be interpreted, that people are people and not imagined ghosts, that space and time are open membranes in which we can still design liveable spaces and opportunities for sharing.
Heir to the great masters for whom these themes were central, from Michelangelo Pistoletto to Olafur Eliasson, Stefano Ronci's work declares that he is a mediator. This means that he wants to give back to the museum, and through this to the community, the possibility for a work of art to be "your container". The peremptory assertiveness of the neon light declares this, and the continuous transformation inherent in the mirror conveys it. Two materials that belong to the history of art and the history of design: in the 160 cm diameter, the distance the work extends into space, the challenge of being together and experimenting together is played out.
A challenge by and at CUBO. (Stefano Ronci. WE are CUBO, at Ilaria Bignotti's CUBO)
