Cicero Spin is an assemblage artist who has exhibited in Brazil. His recent exhibitions include GG Gallery, Fortaleza, Juazeiro do Norte, Museu de Arte da Universidade in Ceará, and Federal do Ceará (MAUC). Cicero’s art has been notably published by Forbes magazine in Valentine’s Day Gift Guide 2025: The Best Red Blend Wines with his art on the wine label as well as an interview with Laura Carlson from Saatchi Art, and a feature in Brazilian magazine Balada IN. He describes his work as “deeply inspired by the aesthetics of urban decay, pop culture, and the repurposing of discarded materials”.
With an urban aesthetic resembling torn street and subway posters and using a wide array of material, Cicero recreates vintage imagery to reflect the nostalgia for more simpler, innocent times. He portrays icons from previous generations such as Frank Sinatra, Batman in vintage attire, 1960’s comic book characters, Lauren Bacall, and Billie Holiday. His works are clearly assemblages as most of them incorporate magazine collage prints or pasted newspaper as well as materials such as cotton fabric, corrugated cardboard, old book pages, office papers, seismic graphs, acrylics, oil markers, spray paint, and stencils. Cicero sometimes even uses materials conceptually such as in the case of his Brain Turtle piece, constructed from collages of failed laser prints of medical prescriptions amongst the human brain being used as a shell for a turtle.
Often crude and roughly applied, these images are created in a manner for which they appear aged, torn, and decayed. An array of art reflecting vintage Americana amid a sea of textural surfaces of varied materials hastily applied together to create an expressive pop art aesthetic. Although the materials are applied in a manner of rawness, his renderings look craftful and accurately captured amidst the mountainous surface of salvaged material assembled together to create his two-dimensional work. Cicero’s stenciling usually becomes executed in a precise manner as well amidst the chaos of his compositions. The delicate balance between creating a plane reflecting urban decay while capturing a rendering which portrays accurate portrayals entails an artist engaged with his process and materials. Cicero investigates the purpose of form by often painting his subjects with bright neon tones, an intentional slightly off-color variation of naturalistic representation.
Brain Turtle (pictured above) remains one of Cicero’s most fascinating works. Besides the conceptual use of materials, the assemblage offers a wide array of applications from attached vintage photographic prints to stenciling, to pieces of salvaged print material throughout. The assemblage reflects a wide array of techniques of shaping an ironic concept amidst the notions of a personal story of collectors working in the medical field. Most patrons would be awarded with a simple portrait, but Cicero’s piece goes beyond by assembling a collage of humerus and vintage material to reflect a metaphorical urban portrait.
Cicero Spin remains an exciting artist who delves into an imaginative world of urban decay and debauchery. His works reflect contemporary notions of analogue processes being reinterpreted in the digital age, a reaction to the plasticity of hyper-realistic imagery often associated with computer renderings. Cicero’s assemblages not only resemble urban decay, they are a direct correlation between materials which shape our historical narratives by process and ingenious assemblage.
