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UNEXPECTED – GIACINTO CERONE / IMPERFETTOLAB curated by Valerio Dehò
SØLO Creative Room, via Nazario Sauro 56, Pietrasanta (LU) | September 26 – October 26, 2025
SØLO Creative Studio presents the exhibition ‘UNEXPECTED – GIACINTO CERONE / IMPERFETTOLAB’, which opens as part of the 10th edition of Collectors Night in Pietrasanta, at SØLO Creative Room, Via Nazario Sauro 56, Pietrasanta (LU).
The exhibition brings together the visionary design of Imperfettolab with a selection of works by Giacinto Cerone from the collections of two Italian galleries: Gasparelli Galleria, Fano (PU) and Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, Milan | Pietrasanta (LU).
Art direction by Marco Martelli Ottoni | Production by SØLO creative studio
Art must surprise, arrive unexpectedly, unpredictably. In both literature and the visual arts, what Roland Barthes called “the pleasure of the text” in writing is the artist's ability to take you where they want you to go, not where you are used to going. Looking is an activity of discovery, a temporary journey into a dimension that we do not fully know, that we can intuit, but that reveals itself starting from something, a detail, a form that attracts us without knowing why. There must always be a deviation, a clinamen that leads the atoms of the gaze towards something unexpected. The rest is regularity, canon, standard, at best. Art history is often easily satisfied; art historians, like biologists, seek genetic lines, often mortifying consanguinity, because they attribute to art a sort of chromosomal necessity, a chain of causes and effects that can at best excite scientists or puzzle enthusiasts. Art is something else; it is always on the side of the children and not the fathers. But what links a group of artists and designers to an extraordinary personality such as Giacinto Cerone? Everything and nothing. Everything because both have always sought to reveal the hidden forms that lurk in the infinity of the world. They have read reality as a reflection of their own minds, with a curiosity about what could ultimately be seen and touched, which even they did not know exactly. Can one draw on the dreamlike without being surrealist? Yes, certainly. This is why Imperfettolab does not count the legs of a table, does not draw on the functionality of chairs or armchairs to create something that is comfortable, does not confuse the Idea with Ikea. Giacinto Cerone, known as one of the greatest Italian ceramists after Leoncillo, also created marbles in which the figurative threshold always appears in perfect harmony with the material. The vibration of the materials in the sculptor gives us profound insights, unexpected echoes, desires to participate in the ecstasy of forms. It would seem that the distance from Imperfettolab is definitive, but instead it reopens by hinting at surprise, at the denial of cause and effect, at the revelation of hidden forms. Shows are fine for other things, but works of art need a kind of intimacy that draws us in. Contrast and the impossible arise from the fact t . hat we perceive the worlds that art presents to us as our own, without knowing why. Perhaps it is Jungian synchronicity that causes the gaze of the audience to meet that of the works. I cannot explain it any other way, but in fact, from Mallarmé and Duchamp onwards, we have simply called it “hasard”. It is as if artists, even when they make something recognisable such as a sculpture or a piece of furniture, indicate to us that what we have before us is not exactly what we think we are looking at. They leave us with the uncertainty of what is not yet visible. Art is based on this indeterminacy, and so is much of the physical world. So said 20th-century science. Cerone's convulsive visionary nature suspends forms a moment before chaos. Imperfettolab's unreason suspends its immobility in a probabilistic space where the unexpected is at home