Stefano Cerio / Vaste Programme

Due mostre: Stefano Cerio – Corpi d’aria e Cascasse il cielo di Vaste Programme – duo artistico composto da Giulia Vigna e Leonardo Magrelli – curata da Giulia Tornesello nell’ambito della bipersonale che vede il lavoro dei Vaste Programme accanto al progetto Aquila di Stefano Cerio.

Comunicato stampa

Cascasse il cielo

curated by Giulia Tornesello

Cascasse il cielo is a body of works created between 2021 and today that focuses its research on the urban landscape and its mutations due to climate change and human negligence. These themes are not new to the artists, whose work has always set out almost surgically to eviscerate the tissues of a world brought to a catastrophic drift by the variation in global temperature brought about by anthropogenic and other causes.

The formalisation of this analysis of dystopia uses the medium of post-photography, the reuse of everyday materials and the significant overturning of iconography and the collective imagination.

In this process of sublimation of signifier and meaning into something else, a marked and biting irony often intervenes with irruptiveness.

The works selected for this exhibition, Le nostre radici (2021-2023) and Il tuo domani, oggi (2023) are being shown to the public for the first time.

Le nostre radici is the paroxysm of a ruinous urban present represented in exquisitely allegorical form. Images of collapsed trees in the city on cars parked in the street – evidence of violent storms and public neglect – are printed on classic car perfumers. The work consists of 55 unique pieces.

Il tuo domani, oggi, on the other hand, depicts the collapse of the Maya veil of a nature that is at first exasperatingly perfect, a prophetic image of a radiant future, and then folds in on itself and collapses like any broken promise. The reference to marketing and its inherently flattering and mendacious nature, which presents the product without showing the destructive industrial process, is made clear with a three-dimensional installation of a roadside advertising panel.

VASTE PROGRAMME – bio

Giulia Vigna (1992) and Leonardo Magrelli (1989) have been working together in Rome as an artistic duo since 2017. In recent months they have been taking part in 13 photographers for 13 museums, commissioned by the Direzione Regionale Musei Lombardia and MUFOCO – Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea curated by Matteo Balduzzi at Palazzo Reale in Milan, in Immaginario/Autentico following an invitation to an artist residency curated by Associazione Arteco and JEST together with the Pinacoteca G.A. Levis in Chiomonte (TO) and at the collective exhibition D3c4m3ron3 at Palazzo Lucarini – Trevi curated by Maurizio Coccia and Mara Predicatori, the result of an artistic residency promoted by Francesca Cornacchini at Casa Francesconi (PG).

In 2023 they are finalists at the E.ART.H Prize – Verona, and in 2022 at the Combat Prize – Livorno.

In 2021 they published The Long Way Home of Ivan Putinik, Truck Driver published by The Eriskay Connection.

Their latest projects include “How to fail a job interview”, a workshop as part of a series of meetings curated by Saverio Verini for Luiss University.

Corpi d’aria

On the occasion of the recent publication of the artist’s latest photographic book, Aquila, published by Hatje Cantz, with graphics by Giulia Boccarossa and a critical text by Stefano Chiodi, Galleria 1/9unosunove is hosting for the first time a solo exhibition by Stefano Cerio in its spaces at Palazzo Santacroce. The exhibition project, which had already been the focus of a major exhibition at the Maxxi L’Aquila, is being presented in Rome for the first time as part of a series of meetings in the artist’s presence – including the presentation of the book that will take place at the gallery during the exhibition.

The publication brings together images from the photographic project carried out in Abruzzo between 2019 and 2021. Cerio’s photographic series – together with the artist’s video Aquila – portrays strongly oniric and evocative places in different seasons of the year, wavering between myth and legend, comparing the severity, solidity and pale colours of the bare Abruzzo mountains with the inconsistency, instability and un-naturalness of amusement park inflatables. The resulting juxtaposition is a softly jarring image with a metaphysical feel. Stefano Chiodi in his Corpi d’aria (hence the title of the exhibition) compares Cerio’s inflatables to “solitary inorganic performers” to which the artist and his camera are merely witnesses; while to us, distant observers, these “presences abandoned in space appear as an unconcealed allusion to volatility.

Cerio’s work recalls the documentary-inspired photography identified in the Düsseldorf school and in particular the Becher couple; and also the explorations of peripheral spaces conducted by artist-photographers such as Stephen Shore and Lewis Baltz. The artist looks at these examples with great expressive freedom and combines a biting ironic taste with a constant, though highly coded, attention to the contemporary social scene.

In its decontextualisation from the everyday, this photographic cycle relates to other series by the artist, such as Cruise Ship (2014) where a large cruise ship is presented as a deserted theatre of escapist fantasies, a fake consumer paradise within reach of the small pockets of the bewildered western petty bourgeoisie.

Aquila introduces a decisive element, a performative trait, a tension and movement that give the inflatables a different – and in some ways more dramatic – echo, and mark the opening of a further phase in the artist’s development.