20 MARCH – 21 MAY 2024
Since the Nineties, the artist has been carrying forward, with various techniques – sculpture, photography, installations, and drawing – a reflection on the regenerative capacity of forms, on their ability to react and proliferate, just like living beings.
The collection of jewelry, created specifically for this exhibition, fits into the artist’s research on spatiality, proportion and modulation on a scale, as a result of generative transformations of thought. As Cecchini himself explains: “I have developed my artistic vocabulary around the concepts of object, model and architecture. Often my work refers in different ways to the idea of inhabiting the space. Today, I delve into the realm of sculpture and environmental installation, guided by the concept of material parcelization—almost akin to a molecular explosion of sculpture—where scientific phenomenology assumes an intimate structure and serves as a conduit for vision”.
The inspiration for these wearable artworks comes from afar. The first spark was ignited in 2012 with the installation on an ancient holm oak in Parco Gori (Santomato, Pistoia), where hundreds of small chrome steel elements descended like an ornament on the plant, drawing a second skin around it. In 2020, Cecchini began creating unique jewelry pieces for his wife. In the collection presented by Babs Art Gallery, this research reaches its highest technical and poetic development, materializing in a series of works produced in a maximum of 9 editions each.
In the rigid bracelet, made in various versions (silver, gold-plated, ruthenium-plated, and powder-coated brass), the precious surfaces are marked by water-like forms, gentle ripples that evoke the Wall Waves Vibrations, wall installations inspired by the movement of liquids and sound propagation.
The silver and gold titanium ring follows the same three-dimensional design, but with a more rounded shape, reminiscent of a cocoon, the nest of an insect. The necklace (in gold or silver) and the earrings (in silver) are instead offshoots of Waterbones, a series of works produced since 2009 resulting from the observation on the morphology of plants and minerals. The combinatorial modules that Cecchini organizes in the installation space and around architectures – mutable and vital units capable of adapting to space and drawing always new forms and perimeters – in their jewelry version have the human body as a new parameter: around the human figure, they grow, climb, and evolve harmoniously. This is a very consistent project with the artist’s vision of space and matter, of the research he has been carrying on “about the human relationship with curved space, a space where the right angle and the Euclidean paradigm give way to organic deformation, pervading the sense of form.”
The exhibition – which also features the contribution of Galleria Continua International Art Gallery – also offers the opportunity to admire a selection of sculptures and installations by the artist: works that fully illustrate Cecchini’s research on movement and his ability to narrate and gather worlds on a small and large scale. On display: Wallwaves vibrations (Cohesive Orbits) from 2021 in white fiberglass that integrates with the wall creating the effect of a vibrant foam on the surface, Nocturnal thesis fragments (2022) where small metal modules climb a burnt rosemary, Aeolian landforms (Kobel) from 2023 where the yellow flocking surface creates the effect of a sea of small velvety dunes, and the site-specific installation Diagram bushes Here and There and Everywhere (sequence 153), a branching of stainless steel modules welded together.
