Marco Cioffi - The Dark Side of Chocolate

Marco Cioffi's artistic practice draws on the school of Pollock and American Abstract Expressionism. His vision of the world is filtered through a profound process of interiorization: the artist embraces the complexity of existence and pours it onto the canvas. Hence the profoundly gestural approach that underpins Marco Cioffi's work. The artist's emotions and spirituality are transformed into a pictorial gesture that gives rise to complex compositions, just as the human self and its relationship with the world are complex. Formally, this translates into an extraordinary variety of interventions on the pictorial support, in a continuous overlapping of energetic brushstrokes, material concentrations, more calligraphic interventions, and emotional drippings. The result is managed by Cioffi in a complex compositional balance that places color at the forefront. Cioffi's works are a continuous interplay of harmonies and dissonances that constantly stimulate the viewer's psyche.

The dark side of chocolate is deforestation, corruption and child labor. The loss of tropical forests dramatically reduces rainfall, and cocoa plants, like other trees, suffer. In fact, cocoa is one of the crops at risk of extinction, potentially disappearing by 2050. Côte d'Ivoire, for example, lost 328,000 hectares of forest in 2014, the equivalent of nearly 47 football fields. Reports revealed a corrupt system: corrupt park rangers accepted bribes to have smallholders cut down trees. The cocoa was then purchased by intermediaries and sold to international distributors like Barry Callebaut and Cargill, who supply it to Mars, Cadbury, and Nestlé. In recent years, however, there has been a drastic drop in prices and a resulting economic crisis in exporting countries. Small cocoa farmers are the last link in the production chain. The harvest of cocoa beans, called pods, is carried out by underpaid workers exposed to pesticides, insect bites, snakebites, and machete wounds. They don't know chocolate because it's too expensive and destined for foreign countries, especially Western countries. The harvest is often carried out by children. Over a million children work on cocoa plantations, according to UNICEF research. The "slave-free" protocol was approved in 2001, but in 2010, child laborers were still employed on the plantations. This is also evidenced by the documentary "The Dark Side of Chocolate," which focuses on child labor on cocoa plantations.

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