Collezione Maramotti has opened the show Quem Genuit Adoravit by Italian artist Manuele Cerutti. Combining large-scale paintings and more intimate works on paper, the exhibition narrates the painter’s personal experience of being (and becoming) a father. The story is both direct and highly symbolic, interweaving biographical events with a rich substrate of allegories. The title, a somehow enigmatic adoration of the Virgin towards her progeny, encapsulates this enigmatic and intimate conundrum well.
Cerruti’s practice is widely characterised by the portrayal of everyday, seemingly uninteresting, objects. Depicted in both a realistic and surreal way, these entities always seem to be coming to life, as if they could start walking out of the frame or crumbling away from it. For Collezione Maramotti, the artist inaugurates an unexpected narration that visually starts from precise studies of the asexual propagation of plants (known as ‘marcotting’) and goes on with a more dramatic and complex layering of symbols and metaphors. The cycle of paintings necessarily begins from the artist’s own experience of becoming a father, in Belgium, away from home. Yet, the show opens up to a broader discourse, going from what it takes to be a parent, to where it leads to. The painter seems to be asking us: How many different worlds and perspectives do you get to participate in when a new life springs? What does it take to get there? How much love do you put into it?
Apart from a few drawings and paintings modest in size, the two sections of works are kept separate: as we enter the building (once the headquarters of the Max Mara Fashion House), we encounter Cerruti’s works on paper. Botanical and mineral explorations, landscape studies, drawings and watercolour paintings, offer a more immediate glimpse into the artist’s world. Cerruti draws on any support he has on hand, be it notebooks or scattered pieces of paper. He carelessly (and consciously) lets the worn-out, creased edges of the paper be seen. This contributes to making the works seem more real, also allowing the painter to appreciate all the layers and aspects he wants to explore with his language.
In these works many of the lines of research that cross the painter’s language begin: we have the investigation of the marcotting technique and its transposition into the human, biographical dimension of the painter. We feel the signs of fatigue and distress that characterise the protagonist throughout the whole story, as opposed to the curiosity of the child who is coming out of his limb. Furthermore, in these smaller pieces, the duties imposed by large-scale canvases cease to exist, leaving way to a more intimate vision. Stripped down to their heart, these oeuvres are like poetry.
There is one small painting that really foreshadows the emotive dimension visitors find in the Pattern Room. It really catches your eye. A father, looking like the artist himself but really representing any parent, has collapsed on the floor; a tired mop in his hands. A newborn (his child) is rising from his feet, exactly like a leaf on a branch. Albeit this new life springs from the father’s leg, the scene is incredibly doomed. An inexorable darkness pervades the room, it overwhelms the dad’s face. The baby, instead, has the well-known attitude that characterises children, playful and curious, exploring their surroundings in amazement. The dad is anguished, and exhausted. His body is forceless. Yet, this exhaustion doesn’t feel like a curse, an inescapable destiny. Rather, it is crowned by care and a certain loving-kindness.
There’s another recurring element in Quem Genuit Adoravit: the marcotting (or layering) technique, a way of propagating a new plant from its own branch by getting roots to form on it. Cerutti turned it into a metaphor of parenthood: just like, in marcotting, the life of the new plant begins from, and within, the parent plant itself, so the life of a newborn does. That’s why the artist’s babies come out directly from the protagonist’s body (as with pregnancy, afterall). To leave space for existence, the branch must be cut open: It’s from a wound that the birth of a new life is made possible.
I do feel like this kind of anguish, the presence of a wound, is everywhere felt in Cerruti’s paintings. It’s a fertile scratch, one you have to care for, but it’s there. In the acid, fluorescent green and in the desolate landscapes. In the abandoned spaces where the man finds himself, too, and in the unstable figures he represents (by no means new to his practice). In Meriti e colpe (‘Merits and Faults’), for example, as in many of the works on paper, the man is losing his balance only to allow the child to have one. There’s also a certain fatigue that accompanies the protagonist, falling asleep in his studio (Tutte le mani dormono, ‘All Hands Fall Asleep’), or being visibly tired and preoccupied with having to carry the past and the future on his shoulders, as in La traversata (‘The Crossing’).
This painting immediately calls to mind the classical representation of Aeneas, emphasising not only the responsibilities derived from parenthood but also the sense of urgency it gives rise to. The composition takes this idea further: a central figure – a man, a father, a son himself – has to bear on himself the weight of, it seems, at least three other people. They are crossing a watercourse, too heavy and dense to allow for smooth, agile movements. His face is hidden away by the figures he’s supporting, as if his identity now depends on somebody else. A baby rests on his arm and a replication of himself lies shakily on his shoulder, his hand brought to a pensive forehead, his feet contracted. There’s no sign of the marcotting here, of a visible wound. And yet, a fragmented dinosaur, presumably the child’s toy, hangs loose from a string leading to the figures.
Surreal in the construction and the storytelling, as well as in the superimposed figures and the continuous metamorphosis, Cerruti’s paintings lack the suspended atmosphere that we most attribute to historical Surrealism, at least to some of its most flamboyant protagonists. These paintings rely more on a mythological repertoire, going from Alcmene, turned into a weasel and forced to give birth from her mouth (it’s not a chance Cerruti painted a small white weasel on the protagonist’s otherwise desert side in Ramo delle confluenze), to Dionysus, who came to life from Zeus’s leg, just to name a few.
If it’s indeed true that Cerrutti’s works, often portraying inanimate objects or close-up body parts, evoke more of a sense of portraiture than still life, then it becomes clear how each element in his new canvases carries profound meaning, whether it’s a tiny mammal or a beloved child, a son.
Manuele Cerutti, Quem Genuit Adoravit – 28th July 2024 Collezione Maramotti
