Raffaella Cortese presented the project CIEL by Marcello Maloberti, which was showcased as a part of the Public Program of Art Basel Paris 2026. CIEL is an installation conceived in the heart of Avenue Winston Churchill, between the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais. At the center of these two Parisian institutions, a large installation is placed, featuring an elevated self-propelled aerial platform whose mechanical arm rises upward, reaching a height of approximately 20 meters, standing like a kind of contemporary obelisk, or an infinite column by Brâncuși. At the top of this arm, on the lifting basket, a large white neon sign appears, displaying, 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 everyday life. The inverted word appears suspended, readable only by the sky itself, becoming a visible and invisible signal, a trace of presence and anticipation. CIEL transforms light into a collective experience and time into a unique instant.

The inversion is not only formal: urban space becomes unstable, traversed by a suspension of 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 overturning that echoes the artist’s work on language and poetry, in that intermediate zone which, as Walter Benjamin writes, does not fully belong either to language or to action, but is located precisely in their precarious interval.

The installation, characterized by a lifting device, recalls an urban aesthetic linked to the idea of works in progress, a construction site in transformation where everything appears suspended and in flux. An authorized worker was supervising the installed work, becoming its guardian and enabling a direct dialogue with passersby.

The light of CIEL becomes a beacon, a point of reference in the heart of the Ville Lumière, so called for being one of the first cities to introduce street lighting and for becoming the pulsating center of European Enlightenment in the 18th century. Paris will be a new important stage in this sky tour initiated by Maloberti in 2022, when he presented the same work at the Bangkok Biennale with the word CIELO inverted, later re-presenting it in his 2024 solo exhibition METAL PANIC at the PAC Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Milan.​​​​