Da lontano sembrano mosche
Manuele Cerutti
17 May – 5 July 2008

* view images | text in Italian *

 

For his first solo show at the gallery, Manuele Cerutti, presents a new body of works in which one can find autobiographical, cultural, literal and cinematographic refernces. His relfection on space, the image and language appears ina personal and fragmented grammar.

The title of the exhibition (They look like flies from far away) is derived from a text by Jorge Luis Borges in which he cites a hypotetical Chinese encylopedia. This contains an unusual classification of the animal species with improbable categories such as "belonging to the Emperor", "trained", "sirenes", "fabulous" etc. The last phrase of the list "Da lontano sembrano mosche" helps us understand how most times we are far from the truth, even when we are not so far away from the suject. All classifications and measuring instruments are useful but always approximate and arbitrary. This is an invitation to forget conventions.

Manuele Cerutti's narration is never straightforward. It configures like a sequence of suggestions, trying to avoid conventional methods of categorising, ordering and classifying the world. His work creates mysteries that leave the viewers perplexed and confused, as if they suddenly don't have any safe place where to step. The narrative aspect of the work is  meant to investigate the possibility of construction of the image, which might be erroneously mistook for virtuosity. Within the same painting, the artist, uses different expressive manners and painting languages, adding some techniques from cinema, such as the zoom, so as to exclude certain parts of the subjects

and to emphasise how much painting is pure fiction.