Le Ragioni dello Spirito

La Fonderia Art Gallery, located on the eponymous street in Florence, presents for the second time the work of Filippo Cigni (Florence, 1996), an artist whose research focuses on matter, color, and visual space, driven by a profound metaphysical interest. His practice investigates the substance of the artwork through a rigorous operative approach.

The Reasons of the Spirit, on view from February 21 to April 4 as part of the 2026 program, brings together—nearly three years after the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery—approximately ten works, including an installation and a series of pieces that clearly reveal the style and creative process consistently pursued by the artist. This new project thus presents the evolution of Filippo Cigni’s research through a body of works executed using materials of various kinds—handled with extreme constructive rigor—such as glass and metal, the latter treated and burned.

The central concept of the exhibition rests on the principle that the spiritual is not a form to be displayed or formally composed, but rather an experience that arises from the precision of the work’s structure. Through exact geometries and material processes, the artwork becomes complete and autonomous, and this independence enables it to subsist beyond its maker. Precisely because the work is correctly constructed, it becomes predisposed to host the spiritual event. There is no “formalism of the spirit,” since the sense of the absolute emerges spontaneously at the moment when the artwork—in its completeness—seems to withdraw, making space for a deeper intuition.

Accompanying the exhibition is a text—written by the artist—that stands as a manifesto of his research, highlighting his indispensable relationship with matter, conceived within a coherent metaphysical system:

“…not twentieth-century empty squares, nor Kandinskian evaporations from figuration to non-figuration. Beyond matter, although matter fully participates in it: the painting is stretcher, canvas, stone. But first: thought and action must be considered…”

And again:

“The Reasons of the Spirit in themselves remain unpredictable and unknowable, yet their effects can be felt. An existential gurgling, an echo within a logical space. Unattainable in green spiritual supermarkets or in the warehouses of ‘I am spiritual in my own way’.”