With the exhibition of Marco Ceroni GALLLERIAPIÙ turns itself into an exploded urban space where decontextualized and manipulated objects and fragments of reality amplify the imaginative potential of seemingly inert details of everyday life. Interacting with semantic vacuum gaps that show the artificiality of our environment, the young artist transforms ordinary, abandoned or vandalized things in the cornerstone of new possible narratives. His landscapes create a kind of counter-image of the everyday life that enhances its creative potential without the need to invent or add anything else and reread the architecture in its most emphatically perceptual dimension using physicality as a reagent and measuring unit in order to amplify its internal contradictions and discontinuity. The body, considered as ductile form, spatial obstruction and dimensional passage, is in fact the first tool with which Ceroni verifies the visual inputs that solicit his gaze when he starts to explore and internalize a place. Crouching himself within a bollard or biting the gap between the sidewalk and the street, the artist appropriates the public space and studies the lines of force as if his actions were the preparatory drawings of what will be structured later.

From the very beginning, when he was varnishing with gold carcasses of abandoned cars in the Milan hinterland, the places that most ignite his imagination are the marginal and rough areas of big cities, where a downward planning and the absence of aesthetic maintenance generate anonymous environments which are freely malleable by his artistic crossing / overturning. The urban landscape elements Ceroni chooses to modify work as a temporary subversion of reality in which he insinuates the seeds of a new vision: even if his interventions are focused on details, what interests him is to free the possible parallel universes that lie just below our perceptions anesthetized by habit.

Consistent with this premise, Late Night Show was born from the evocation of one of the most common non-places of our times, the parking lot of a multiplex cinema during the last evening screening. Intersection point between melancholy routine and illegal trade, connecting outpost between the loneliness of the individual and his membership in an undifferentiated crowd, this liminal area is saturated with traces and echoes of the passage of those who passes through and when the night envelops it with silence and beauty, desires, fantasies and fears grow up and become overpowering. Ceroni personifies the demons of our collective imagination in a theory of cult movie posters made between the seventies and eighties in which a gold leaf covers titles and locations, leaving only see the portraits of the protagonists. Nikita, Akira, the boys of 56th Street, ninja turtles and many others make up a complex pantheon of anti-heroes of affection that weave their stories of urban warfare with our daily memories and flashbacks. Ironically hieratic as the theories of saints and emperors delivered to eternity by Byzantine mosaics, these characters are actually debunked by the golden aura around them, through which the dystopia of their original stories becomes harmless slow motion of surreal attitudes.

The narrative of the car park becomes minimal in the second room of the exhibition, where the artist seems to abruptly change the registry compared to the iconic density of the first environment: in a desert and rarefied mental space few abstract sculptural presence evoke and amplify the short circuit between real and probable. So in Moonwalk the contradictory assembly of a bollard with two precious yellow marble cones of Siena that serve as basements materializes the power of art to identify unexplored worlds even in the most expressionless folds of reality and its vocation to make every aspect of our lives more interesting. The clash between man and the tinplates of the transports that accelerate his movement assumes an erotic and violent valence in L’Amour Toujours, where the resin mold of some fragments of hulls scooters scattered on the ground allude to a mysterious “scene of the disaster.” Intriguing in their insolvable ambiguity between exhausted oil stains on the asphalt and fossil amber, they make disturbing cyberpunk literary reminiscences and even more alienating pop culture detritus 90 years collapse and converge: as the critical text by Fabiola Naldi emphasizes, Ceroni’s challenge and game is precisely this, to try to crash in the unbalance between the fiction and the holdover of tangible experience elements which are very distant from each other but that in some way coexist in the accumulation of our perceptions and removals. His playful but critically disenchanted approach involves the visitor in the exploration of a parallel universe where the hybridization between different and rationally incompatible imaginary results in a free game of similarities and contrasts. So the call is to ride without fear of losing ourselves the flamboyant imagination steeds, which in our days could be rigged scooters by a company of kids who consider the parking a boundless landscape of dreams and adventures. The irrepressible demon of freedom is embodied in Spirit, idol and fetish generated by the anthropomorphic interpretation of the front part of a scooter as a spontaneous epochal update of the Bull Head built by Picasso in the 40s by assembling a saddle and a handlebar of a bicycle.

Marco Ceroni. Late Night Show.
2017, March 25th – June 10th
GALLLERIAPIÙ
Via del Porto 48 a/b Bologna