Cielo translates as “sky and heaven” in English from both Italian and Spanish, and nothing visually captures the essence of the “sky” in the popular imagination as much as angel-adorned clouds, a material object also totally ephemeral in nature: literally here one moment, gone the next. That sense of transience, of an “impermanent state of being,” has obsessed the world-renowned Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde ever since he first created, then photographed, his first cloud installation, Nimbus, inside a small sixteenth-century chapel in Hoorn, Holland, back in 2012. 

Smilde has since reprised such hyperrealistic miniature cloud installations in factories, museums, castles and dungeons around the world, to much critical acclaim. The original photo of Nimbus now resides at London’s famous Saatchi Gallery. The global celebrity of Smilde’s clouds grew even greater when international fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar published photographs of four of the world’s most famous designers - Karl Lagerfeld, Alber Elbaz, Donatella Versace, Dolce & Gabbana - up-close-and-personal with Smilde’s eerily beautiful clouds in a piece, appropriately titled, ICONOCLOUDS.