Giacinto Cerone (1957-2004) was one of the most original and free Italian sculptors, far from the groupings, schools, movements, styles or fashions of the moment. The impetuosity of his language is measured from the different materials used both in sculptural production (wood, ceramic, plastic, metal, marble, plaster, stone) and in drawing, mostly independent of the creation of sculptural works, as well as in the use of techniques related to speed and gestures.
Faenza has been a favorite destination for Cerone since 1993, that is, when at the Gatti workshop he made a series of glazed ceramics using perhaps unorthodox but highly expressive working techniques and experimenting with a wide variety of colors and shapes.
The MIC, which has several of Cerone’s works in its collection, dedicates to the artist, twenty years after his death, a major exhibition that groups together some 45 sculptures of various materials and periods, plus a series of 35 drawings (some of large format), privileging Cerone’s very way of working: by thematic series (as in the red Malerbe, Vietnamese Rivers, Gypsum, Metals) or by single works with an emblematic and in some ways iconic and funerary character (such as Cenacolo and Ophelide). It is in this tension that plays out, in the diversity of materials, the curatorial structure of the exhibition The Necessary Angel, that sort of “approximate figure,” “glimpsed, or seen an instant” described by the American poet Wallace Stevens and often elusive delineation in the imperfect and liminal figures of Cerone’s interrupted statuary.
The exhibition, curated by art critic Marco Tonelli and promoted by MIC with the support of the Cerone Archive and private lenders, aims to delineate the figure of an all-around sculptor and a total sculpture (capable of stretching horizontally or leaning against walls), without remnants, of an artist who was also attentive to the way he installed his exhibits as if they were works in themselves.
A catalog published by Corraini will be published on the occasion of the exhibition, with texts by Claudia Casali (director of MIC), Marco Tonelli (curator of the exhibition) and apparatuses by Elena Cavallo (wife of the artist and Head of the Cerone Archive.
