Claudio Cionini

Claudio Cionini was born in Grosseto in 1978. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where he began, in 2000, his exhibition activity. After his studies, his attention immediately turned to the industrial landscape, a reality that surrounds him in the city where he has always resided, Piombino.

In 2003 the exhibitions at Westbeth Arts Gallery in New York “Still Classical: Recent Works on Paper from Florentine Academies and Studios,” at ISB Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and at Palazzetto Cenci in Rome.

His work is structured as a journey through the world’s great cities—Paris, Venice, London, New York, Tokyo, Rome, Berlin—which become fragments of a single mental landscape. These metropolises are never merely subjects of cityscapes, but living, layered organisms—places of collective memory where history, transformation, and desire intertwine. Each city is at once real and imagined, observed and reconstructed, until it transforms into a form of inner vision.

Cionini’s painting is based on a slow, layered construction of the surface, through which light becomes the structural element. Reflections, atmospheric variations, and tonal color fields contribute to the creation of suspended images—often devoid of any direct human presence—in which the living urban landscape remains the absolute protagonist. The rarefaction of the image and the blurring of contours evoke an unstable perceptual dimension.

At the heart of his research lies the relationship between urban space and the natural world, between architectural order and the city’s vital flow, which manifests as a constant tension between construction and dissolution, permanence and change. Cities, despite their solidity, are portrayed as entities in a state of constant transformation, capable of preserving and, at the same time, rewriting their own identity.