Marcello Maloberti, CIEL at Art Basel Paris Public Program, Paris

Raffaella Cortese presents Marcello Maloberti’s project CIEL as part of the Public Program of Art Basel Paris 2026, an installation conceived in the heart of Avenue Winston Churchill, between the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais. At the center of the two Parisian institutions stands a large installation consisting of a self-propelled aerial platform, whose mechanical arm rises upward, soaring to a height of approximately 20 meters, elevating itself like a contemporary obelisk, like a Brâncuși infinite column. At the top of this arm, on the elevating basket, appears a large white neon inscription that displays, in Maloberti’s handwriting, the word CIEL inverted with respect to the viewer.

Maloberti creates a monument/anti-monument, in which the inverted word becomes an urban mirror. The city is reflected in the sky and the sky responds, in a dialogue involving architecture, light, and the perception of the everyday. The inverted inscription appears suspended, legible only from the sky itself, becoming a signal that is both visible and invisible, a trace of presence and of waiting. CIEL transforms light into a collective experience and time into a unique instant.

The inversion is not merely formal: urban space becomes unstable, crossed by a suspension of the gaze that produces a form of active disorientation, a “hierophany,” an irruption of the sacred into ordinary space. CIEL becomes a vertigo and the neon writing a boundary, an inversion that continues the artist’s work on word and poetry.

The installation, characterized by a lifting device, adopts an urban aesthetic that evokes the idea of “works in progress,” a construction site in transformation, where everything appears suspended and in becoming.

The light of CIEL becomes a beacon, a point of reference in the heart of the Ville Lumière, so named because it was one of the first cities to introduce street lighting and because it became the beating heart of the European Enlightenment in the 18th century.

Paris becomes a new and important stage in this tour of the skies begun in 2022 by Maloberti, who had presented the same work on the occasion of the Bangkok Biennale with the word CIELO inverted, and then proposed it again on the occasion of his 2024 solo exhibition METAL PANIC at the PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan.