Times CEO Magazine Interview with Matteo Ciampica
Redefining Contemporary Art Through Time, Testimony, and Human Interaction
https://www.timesceo.com/interviews/matteo-ciampica-interview
The art of Matteo Ciampica arises from a radical inner transformation that takes shape as a gesture of subtraction, silence, and authenticity. His artworks, released into the world and entrusted to humanity, become instruments of stillness, occasions for suspension and deep listening in a society dominated by speed and emotional distortion. Trust in others lies at the center of his poetics, and the Kairos becomes the instrument through which this poetics expands into the world. It is the instant in which something changes because it must change, a time that does not flow but is configured, emerges as a positive possibility. His paintings and his Interactions generate connections, reveal possibilities, and invite each person to rediscover their own inner space. In Ciampica’s work, silence becomes an act of care, a gift returned to the world.
Times CEO Magazine: Many critics describe your choice to free your artworks into the world as a radical, almost sacred gesture. Yet you yourself say that it all began with a profound catharsis, a moment in which something inside you collapsed and was reborn at the same time. Can you tell us how this inner transformation revolutionized your artistic work?
Matteo Ciampica: I spent decades creating in silence, holding back every emotion the way one holds their breath for too long. I lived closed off and isolated in my studio, and the art I produced no longer gave anything back to me. The places where I continued to exhibit felt increasingly hostile, like prisons, jails, traps. One night, I woke up abruptly with a strong sensation of suffocation, I wanted to scream but I couldn't make any sound. I felt a clear urgency to open myself to the world, to offer what I had guarded, to invite others to look at themselves through what I had created. I identify that moment as my kairos. Freeing my works into the world was a natural gesture, like letting go of a breath that had been held for far too long. But the need for openness went beyond the canvases, and so the interactions Voices of Time and Instant's Poetic were also born, allowing art to become a wider form of dialogue. Everything I do since then aims to make possible, even for others, that moment when one decides to stop holding their breath and let the world in, finally, without fear.
Times CEO Magazine: Kairos is a central concept in your poetics. Can we delve deeper into its role?
Matteo Ciampica: kairos is my catharsis. Kairos is not the when, it is the why right now. It is my personal liberation becoming a public act. It is the transformation of my crisis into a gift, into an initiative that could generate kairos in others as well. It is the passage from a private healing to a shared remedy against the sterile frenzy that grips the soul in modernity. It is the moment when the paintings become silent messengers, asking people to stop, to look, to think. It is the convergence between an internal necessity and what I perceive as a collective need. It is the urgency to rediscover authenticity in everyday relationships. It is the need for an essential gesture that materializes in taking away, in a form of subtraction.
Times CEO Magazine: Your works travel all over the world; they are gathered, protected, photographed, and shared by thousands of people. And yet you maintain that, within this movement, the essence of the project remains the quiet. How do these two things coexist?
Matteo Ciampica: Every painting, every Interaction, every word I produce exists to offer an opportunity for slowing down, a suspension. An invitation to truly see. We live in a world where everything demands speed, yet nothing demands depth. Everything leads to an existential saturation. The need for stillness is an urgency that weighs upon all of humanity. A return to silence, to the essential gesture, to time flowing in its positive form; these are now necessities. The movement linked to my wandering artworks generates authentic relationships between individuals of all peoples, allowing for a pause, a breath, a genuine sharing. What I myself have struggled to rediscover.
Times CEO Magazine: The Cypress is the distinctive mark of every work belonging to the Aphonia production. Why this plant in particular?
Matteo Ciampica: The Cypress is the opposite of immediacy; it lives a long, slow, patient time that does not bow to haste. It is a way of being in the world without noise, and art does not need to be noisy to be effective. I often walk along avenues of cypresses, as a child I played in their shade. Growing up, I developed the strong feeling of being observed, not with judgment, but with a positive, supportive presence. Those cypresses were Witnesses who would not have allowed my research to be lost. So I began to think of them as a symbol of my poetics, a call to listening, an invitation to depth. I do not paint them, I literally carry them within my gestures. They are there, vertical, motionless, faithful, like spirit, posture, promise.
Times CEO Magazine: The concept of the Witness is another fundamental element of your thought, one that is not limited to the figure of the Cypress. Can you explain the role it plays in your poetics?
Matteo Ciampica: We live in a world in which we look at everything but see nothing. The Witness is the counterpart of the consumer, he does not take in order to possess, but in order to safeguard. The Witness is the one who walks past one of my works abandoned in an unexpected place and decides to stop. Whether he pick it up or not, that simple gesture of attention entails an inner transformation, but also a transformation of the time and space in which that interaction occurs. A conferral of meaning appears, one that did not exist before. Over the years, the witnesses have become thousands, different people, different languages, different sensibilities who recognized in my signs a common call. I wanted to create objects that do not shout, do not compete, do not demand, but that simply require a choice. The Witness is the one who chooses presence, who chooses custodianship, and becomes the trigger for a potential Kairos for all humanity.
Times CEO Magazine: You state that you conduct an obsessive research on Time, in an attempt to offer humanity a positive restitution of this dimension. The concept of Time-Space that you develop seems profoundly connected to Aphonia works and to your Interactions. What is the meaning of this intense research?
Matteo Ciampica: It means recognizing that every experience is an interweaving between a when and a where, and that both can be transformed, as they are two sides of the same coin. I have never conceived of time as the flowing of something. I treat time as a single instant that changes, and with my artworks I fix onto the canvas the different configurations of this incessant mutation. Nothing flows, we are faced with a field of possibilities. Capturing the greatest possible number of these configurations becomes my mission, the foundation of my research. I deliver these Forms of Time to the world so that each person may glimpse their own, may see in it the essence that saves, that restores the awareness of one’s place in the world. The configuration of a painting is no longer only that of the gesture that extracts it, but also that of the gaze that encounters it and interprets it. The spaces in which this occurs cannot be reduced to a physical place, but become the emotional context in which these temporal configurations are infused with new meanings. Without speaking, many people are communicating. My Interactions are relational fields in which time and space generate bonds even beyond the will of the individual participants.
Times CEO Magazine: Did you expect such a positive, large-scale response to your artistic initiatives?
Matteo Ciampica: No, and perhaps it is precisely for this reason that it happened. When a gesture is born pure, without the arrogance of ambition, the world perceives it as authentic. People are hungry for authenticity. They want to feel part of something that asks nothing in return, that sells nothing, that judges nothing. The quiet I struggled to rediscover was not only my own necessity. It is a universal need.
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