Exhibition – Diego Cibelli, “Porcelain Boundaries”

As part of the Neapolitan season opening on June 6, 2026, at the Condé Museum in the Château de Chantilly, while the Jeu de Paume presents the collections of Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples during the Empire, the Neapolitan artist Diego Cibelli is creating an installation, that is, a series of sculptures created specifically for the exhibition, intended for one of the most iconic spaces in the Grand Apartments.

For the first time, one of the most iconic 18th-century settings, the Grande Singerie, painted in 1737 by Christophe Huet, will host a contemporary work. In this interior, where layers of taste, power, and memory overlap, Diego Cibelli does not reconstruct the now-lost porcelain collection of the Princes of Condé; rather, he revives its memory and the imagination it evokes. His delicate forms, in which human, animal, and plant figures intertwine, seem to come from an enchanted world. Spanning Naples and Chantilly, his work bridges two great histories of refinement, the decorative arts, and collecting in a joyful meditation on the strange, otherness, and the fluidity of forms and materials.

FROM NAPLES TO BERLIN AND CHANTILLY

Born in Naples in 1987, Diego Cibelli studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in his hometown before continuing his education at the Weissensee Kunsthochschule in Berlin. Back in Naples, he works, from his studio in the working-class neighborhood of Scampia on the outskirts of the city, with a material emblematic of the artistic and political history of the Kingdom of Naples: bisque porcelain (unglazed ceramic).

This fragile, milky material allows him to explore the poetic forms of life, creating a dialogue and interweaving human, animal, mythological, and fantastical figures in a world of metamorphoses.

Following an exhibition at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples in 2021, Diego Cibelli won the first Carta Bianca Prize in 2024, before creating a permanent installation at the Rovati Foundation in Milan in September 2025.

PORCELAIN AS A LEGACY

In Naples, porcelain holds a unique place in the history of power and taste, similar to the role it played in Chantilly. Founded in 1743 by King Charles of Bourbon, the royal porcelain manufactory of Capodimonte was one of the most ambitious in Europe before being given a new lease on life under the reign of Joachim Murat and Caroline Bonaparte, who revived its spirit of experimentation and diplomatic significance.

Diego Cibelli draws on this legacy, freely reinterpreting it in an enchanting fusion of anthropomorphic, botanical, and animal forms, as seen in the site-specific work he created for the Grande Singerie.

Painted in 1737, this famous arabesque-style decoration, populated by mischievous ape-like figures in which the Five Senses and the Four Parts of the World interact and intertwine, once housed the Duke of Bourbon’s precious porcelain collections. As early as 1725, this prince had founded his own porcelain manufactory in Chantilly, which remained in operation until 1870.

The Grande Singerie brought together porcelain produced in Chantilly as well as pieces from the far reaches of Asia, evoking an imaginary Orient, a promise of escape to “elsewhere” cherished by Enlightenment societies.

In 2026, with “Porcelain Boundaries”, Diego Cibelli recreates the fantastical and metamorphic world of this collection, traces of which have now been lost, in a harmonious clash of representations.

The exhibition’s title evokes the distant lands of the 18th-century imagination as well as the shifting boundaries between kingdoms, forms, and materials, all central to the artist’s work. “Porcelain Boundaries” thus explores strangeness and otherness through a series of encounters between characters, architecture, decor, contemporary art, and the public.

This installation weaves a unique dialogue between the history of the Chantilly collections, the exotic imagination of the 18th century, and contemporary forms of the experience of discovering the foreign world, an experience deeply rooted in the millennia-old tradition of the port city of Naples.

Diego Cibelli – First Prize, Carta Bianca 2024

This exhibition and its promotion are supported by the SANTéART Association, which awarded its first Carta Bianca Prize to Diego Cibelli in 2024. Rooted at the intersection of art and the human sensibility, the Carta Bianca Prize builds a bridge between the world of artists and the world of patients. It is founded on key values inherent to the healthcare professions—sharing, selflessness, commitment, solidarity, and humanity—and views engagement with the artwork as a source of revitalization and rebirth. With an annual prize fund that ranks it among the most significant French and European awards, the Carta Bianca Prize has, over the course of its last three editions, supported twenty-four artists selected by a Franco-Italian committee.