STEFANO CHIODI meets STEFANO CERIO
About the artist’s project at the MAXXI Museum L’Aquila
Friday 26 november 2021 h 18.30 AlbumArte Via Flaminia, 122 – 00196 Rome
Free admission subject to availability GREEN PASS and health obligations
On Friday 26 November at AlbumArte, at 6.30 p.m., a meeting between Stefano Cerio (Rome 1962, works between Rome and Paris) and Stefano Chiodi, art critic and associate professor of History of Contemporary Art at Roma Tre University, to present for the first time in Rome the Aquila project created by the artist for the MAXXI Museum in L’Aquila (Abruzzo).
“Aquila”, one of the projects chosen for the opening of the MAXXI L’Aquila Museum, on view from 28 October, consists of a video and a photographic series depicting inflatable playgrounds, isolated and decontextualised, portrayed in the uncontaminated and highly recognisable natural landscapes of the Abruzzo region in the Campo Felice Plain, Campo Imperatore and Pescasseroli. In a second room of the museum, dedicated to the project, two images are a tribute to Onna, the small village almost entirely destroyed in the 2009 earthquake, where the artist places an inflatable, inspired by the church around which the small community has been gathering since 2010. Cerio’s research has always moved poetically towards exploring the relationship between reality and fiction, and his artistic research is oriented towards the representation of absence, emptiness and immobility, in places dedicated to mass entertainment, such as empty funfairs at night, abandoned because no longer in use or in ruins, creating through this short circuit that he puts into practice in his works, a special empty portrait, where absence weighs more than presence.
“The ground is snowy, the horizon closed by a line of dark mountains, low milky clouds hide the sky. On the ground, in the foreground, an indistinct shape, a strange drooping mass in bright colours, red, yellow, blue, swirls in the air. In less than a minute, a large playground attraction appears, an ‘inflatable’, a rounded, awkward and friendly shape, similar to a double slide or a trampoline, of the kind that is easy to encounter in children’s playgrounds, fairs and village festivals. Together with four other inflatables of similar shapes – a chubby castle complete with dragon, a mini football pitch, etc. – the ‘slide’ is an element of the game. – Together with four other similar inflatables – a chubby castle complete with dragon, a five-a-side football pitch, etc. – the “slide” is an element of the strange landscape evoked by Stefano Cerio’s Aquila, a video and a series of photographs taken in Abruzzo in different seasons and in highly evocative places not far from L’Aquila, between the Campo Felice Plain, Campo Imperatore and Pescasseroli. […]” (Stefano Chiodi)
