Cristina Petrelli – Nothing is too strange to be true
Objects of more or less common use, recognizable places are the areas of research of Cristiano Berti. A night city view, still and quiet is the protagonist of Silent Nights, where the magic of darkness becomes the scenery of a delicate epiphany. It’s a 30’’ short video, which, while leaving us surprised and spellbound, suggests the artist viewpoint and his own attitude in analysing the reality. In the lenticular image Ancona, two sights of the same place meet: they are a view of an urban public park. It is an identical and different place at the same time, which becomes source of doubt, reflection, being impossible to state which is the real existing sight, being the used means: photography. No sentence can better explain this concept than the Saul Bellow “Nothing is too strange to be true”, chosen by the artist as the exhibition title. It reveals an attention common to all the exposed works and, more generally, to the whole work of the artist. You can, in fact, find in Berti a kind of insisting on what is unusual, unexpected, upsetting. It’s a transversal glance the artist directs on the everyday reality that each one can recognize. It is the case of Scuola di Modellato, an installation made of 24 copies of positive casts of legs. The artist got these resin objects, of the eighties, after discarding by an ortopedic laboratory. Useful objects, certainly not for art use, which are taken and put on a wall. A conceptual more than physical operation, which, while depriving the object of its real function, modifies its meaning. In fact, the artist goes back to the classic tradition, exposing the casts hung on the wall, making so possible the observation. It becomes then intentional the direct referring to the academy Galleries of plaster casts or, as said in the title, to the Schools of shaping, given the naturalism of the objects, necessarily and completely similar to the human limbs. Berti, while systematically drawing them near, allows us to note the similarities and the differences, establishing a classifying process. It’s a procedure that, in a way, refers also to the first museum collection, the “Wunderkammer” which were spread between the XVI and XVIII centuries, where various objects were collected, the curious, the rare and the precious ones, in order to represent the whole world. This installation has a similar intention, where an incurable contrast between a static observation of the objects, to study and understand them, and their singleness is created. The singleness which, in this specific case, is concerning casts made after amputations. You can’t, then, ignore the inner importance of an object which is full of its own pain and suffering. An empathetic reaction, a deep emotional involvement derives from the classifying operation, instead of having a cataloguing , an explanation. The artist again provokes that kind of gap, while relating to use objects, which brings to a reflection. It is as if Berti moved on a thin line which divides uprightness from uncertainty, perfection from mistake. It isn’t in a clear way, but through a continuous osmotic process where these two aspects of reality never appear to be totally distinct and divisible. And again we are alone, powerless, facing the inevitability of human destiny, without any possibility to get help from human reason, from rationality. A semantic dizziness is provoked by the present interventions of the artist, who reveals the dark side, the nonsense, what’s unsolved, in the apparent normality of the existence.
© Cristina Petrelli, 2007
from: Cristiano Berti – Niente è troppo strano per essere vero, exhibition leaflet, Fuorizona artecontemporanea, Macerata, 2007
