THE SHAPE OF MEMORY
Exhibition by Francesca Romana Cicia
Curated by Matteo Chincarini

Colour, even before it becomes image, acts on perception and memory. It is through this deep and intuitive dimension that the research of Francesca Romana Cicia unfolds. A Roman artist working across painting, sculpture and ceramics, she questions what remains of experience: what we remember, what transforms, and what slowly slips into oblivion.

In Cicia's works, memory is not an archive of defined images but a fluid, layered space made of fragments, absences, emotions and traces. The surface of the work becomes a site of excavation, a threshold through which to bring back to light what belongs to a hidden dimension of consciousness.

At the centre of this research is blue, a recurring and deeply identifying colour. For the artist it is the dimension of the mind, of silence and of hidden things; the colour of what does not offer itself immediately to the gaze. In the large painted surfaces, built up through glazes, overlays and transparencies, colour becomes a material capable of giving shape to the invisible. The canvases evoke marine depths, submerged vegetation, caves crossed by light, or inner landscapes. The boundary between reality and imagination grows uncertain, and the viewer is invited to immerse themselves in the work rather than simply observe it.

And yet Cicia's blue is never dark in an absolute sense. Within the depth of the surfaces a luminous presence constantly emerges: a trace, an opening, a point of orientation. Light passes through the blue and suggests that even what is hidden can be reached and crossed.

It is in the relationship between presence and absence, between what appears and what remains concealed, that the evocative power of her painting is defined. Forms are not declared but suggested; signs surface slowly, leaving room for the imagination. The work becomes a threshold between the visible and the invisible, between clear recollection and what survives as sensation.

Cicia's research also extends to ceramics, introducing a physical and tactile dimension. Where in painting memory appears impalpable, in matter it takes on a body. Glazed surfaces, fragments and organic forms evoke petals, leaves and shells, while blue turns into wave, reflection, mineral trace or fragment of nature.

On the occasion of the exhibition at MIRROR, this research enters into dialogue with the world of design. An artist's lamp, created especially for the exhibition in collaboration with Poignée, is presented — born from the encounter between the creative sensibility of Francesca Romana Cicia and the company's design expertise.

The lamp translates into space one of the central elements of the artist's research: light. From an element of painting it becomes the real material of design, an integral part of the exhibition experience.