Valerio Ciccone (born Melbourne 1970) is an Australian artist who is best known for his drawings of mass-media events and icons taken from popular culture. He has worked from his Northcote-based studio at Arts Project Australia since 1984, where he has also had numerous solo shows. He has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally [see Exhibitions] and his work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Trinkhall Museum, Liège, and the National Sports Museum.
Ciccone grew up in the semi-rural suburb of Yarrambat, the third of four children. According to his mother, he began “drawing obsessively” from the age of four or five, and even at this young age his key source of imagery was taken from the mass media (television and newspapers).[1] It was during his childhood that he began creating his collection of rendered logos from favourite television shows, a collection he has continued to expand throughout his life, alongside others, including a collection of music cassettes which extends to over 1000 objects. Ciccone has demonstrated an extraordinary memory for these collections (which remain unlabelled and yet are perfectly organised and accessible for him) and an ability to recall the names of individual persons met briefly, over periods stretching many years. This ability has been noted as a key component of his artwork, informing the connections he draws between figures of public life and popular culture, and the attention to detail in his technical execution.[1]
In 1984 Ciccone was one of the first artists to take up a studio residency at Arts Project Australia (APA), an organisation devoted to supporting and promoting artists with an intellectual disability. Although he has received little formal training, his participation in the studio program at APA provided him with access to fine art materials and the informal tuition provided by the practicing artists employed by the organisation. He also spent a number of years attending weekly drawing classes at the School of Art at RMIT University.[1] Ciccone’s early works were in watercolour and in the early 1990s he produced a series of monochrome drawings featuring imagery and text taken directly from newspapers. Following a serious illness in 1993 and a lengthy period of rehabilitation, his work underwent a significant change as he introduced colour to his palette. During this time he produced artworks centred on the actions and heroics of Australian Rules Football players, one of which has been acquired for the permanent collection of the National Sports Museum.
Career, themes and style
Glenn Barkley, Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, has described Ciccone’s “obsessive engagement” with television and mass media presentations of sporting events as being a quintessential trait of his generation, stating that for “Generation X,” there is “little difference between what we might watch and how we might feel.”[2] He notes the manner in which Ciccone democratises his subjects, describing an oeuvre of works in which “cathedrals are as important as the corner of a studio and lions lie with mice, and elephants, and koala bears.” However, Barkley is careful to point out that Ciccone’s works are not flippant; he attributes his use of low-brow televisual imagery to a project which elevates and finds meaning in banal aspects of contemporary life, claiming that he “celebrates the mundane, the disposable and finds it beautiful.”[2] Stylistically, Ciccone’s rendering of mass media personages and events in soft, layered pastel, work towards this elevation of his subject, transforming the “flatness of newsprint or flickering image on the screen” into something “warm and personal.”[2]
Although best known for his works in pastel on paper, Ciccone has worked in a range of mediums including painting, printmaking, ceramics and digital animation. His work has been categorised within the genre of Outsider Art and has been included in Outsider Art exhibitions and fairs, both in Australia and in the USA. However, in recent years his work has also achieved success in more conventional art institutions and has been acquired for major permanent collections at the National Gallery of Australia (Print Archive) and MADMusée, Liège, Belgium.
Solo exhibitions
Valerio Ciccone, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 2014
Valerio Ciccone: Peripheral Observer, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 2012
Ball! Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 1999
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1 2 3 Barkley, Glenn (2011). "This is me – some thoughts on the art of Valerio Ciccone". Valerio Ciccone: Peripheral Observer– via Arts Project Australia.
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