The event
Life as an art director. Then the encounter with art and the discovery of a radical calling which finds its expression in using old time-worn metal sheets, custodians of countless testimonies derived from their past “lives”. Born in 1961, since 1999 Andrea Cereda has devoted himself entirely to sculpture and installations, finding in the language of art a means for “evoking stories”, giving those who look at them the opportunity to make them their own, to participate in a feeling that, while originating from his personal experience, actually touches on the sphere of the universal. Communicating feelings and providing viewers with elements and ideas that can put them in contact with themselves is what he tries to do in all his work. The discovery of his and our “worlds” takes place in his atelier-workshop, a space which, like his works, exudes emotions that arise from the past of things.
How a Walrus is Born
From the design to the selection of materials, from their elaboration to assembly, through “urgent” welding, as he himself calls it. In this video Andrea Cereda tells us how a walrus comes into being and takes shape from his creativity, one of the many animals that comprise his extraordinary bestiary.
Marco Mandelli
He made a dream come true with Andrea Cereda: to transform into “works of art” the metal sheets with which he makes his company’s extensive catalogue of products and which his customers all over the world already consider “artfully made” for the quality, care, perfection, and high level of customisation that make them unique on the market. That is how Marco Mandelli, through his friendship with Andrea Cereda, linked the image of Silfa to the artist’s creativity, creating an absolutely extraordinary combination.
Alberto Casiraghy’s Pulcinoelefante
Since 1982, his publishing house has printed more than 10,800 titles in less than 40 years. This is how Alberto Casiraghy, founder in 1982 of “Pulcinoelefante” became a true literary “fluke”: so much so that his thousands of small plaquettes, formed by a text (aphorism or short poem) printed by hand with movable type and accompanied by small engravings or original drawings by artists, always with a run of less than 60 copies, were purchased by the Municipality of Milan and today are displayed in a room in the Boschi Di Stefano House-Museum.
The editorial line follows the pattern of the encounters and wishes of founder Alberto Casiraghy: authors, poets falsely unknown and then made famous such as Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Jean Cocteau, Wisława Szymborska, Arturo Schwarz.
But it was Alda Merini who made Pulcinoelefante’s journey unique: from the moment the founder and the Milanese poetess met, over 700 booklets came into being and the certainty that this was a story not only to tell but also be put on display.
Gestation
A work that evokes the meaning of biological and cosmic birth, through the use of an archetypal form, all the while intuitive and allusive, direct and elusive, explicit because it can be associated with a natural form such as an ovoid one, but also mysterious for its size, for its sudden and inexplicable appearance in the centre of a geometrically defined space.
A sort of meteorite rained down from the heavens, a biological yet mythological entity, a sphinx that questions us on the meaning of time, the origin of existence. But also an empty exoskeleton, the remains of a completed gestation process, a sort of placenta abandoned after serving to nourish life.
Vittorio Raschetti
The Submerged Part of Self
It is composed of the skeletons of bare and simple boats, to represent wrecks as synonyms of the unresolved issues each of us carries within. Being made with recycled materials puts the appearance of these sculptures with their intrinsic meaning in close philological connection; in fact, just as they appear worn, rusty, and abandoned, in the same way all those problems which have been swallowed up in our consciences, below, within and laterally, could appear equally worn, deteriorated and forgotten.
Annalisa D’Amelio
Giangol – Bestiary and Bins
While being faithful to his search, this modern bestiary of exotic animals flirts with us with wit and grace; profiles exasperated in their peculiarities precisely because they belong to the pure universe of imagination, often kept dormant and imprisoned by our rationality, but which awakens when we stumble upon the tenderness of a purring cat or a dog wagging its tail. Instead of being a Tarzan who, with his call, tames and summons the animal kingdom to him, the bestiary of Cereda indulges, if anything, Noah’s invitation to board the same boat and share the fantastic journey of an aesthetic experience that pays tribute to the pure world of animals. Which is the one closest to the imagination and dreams of the spectator.
Natale Oggionni
Custodians
The shell, the skin, a body’s last barrier before the encounter/confrontation with the outside. The need to protect oneself from external agents that could defile the contents even with their gaze. The installation consists of 13 elements made of the trays of old construction worker wheelbarrows assembled two by two (one on top of the other) so as to form “shells” that protect what is inside and deny access to the viewer’s eye. What we know about others, after all, is only what we see externally.
The innermost thoughts are jealously guarded in the depths.
Costellazioni empiriche
Each individual, in their uniqueness, is potentially a star.
Trying to rise above earthly things, freeing oneself of the most visceral impulses and instincts that inextricably anchor us to the ground, is a necessity. A necessity dictated by the desire to rid ourselves of what impedes us within from reaching that ideal of perfection attributed to the stars. Shadow plays a fundamental role in this series of works: it is the projection of a dream, of a desire… it is the visible part of our aspirations.
The Order of Things
What in our vision may appear to be the result of chance, disorder, indecipherable logarithm, in Nature finds its own metrical sense, an apparently non-existent logic – but in reality decisive – to establish the order that supports it.
It happens in the animal kingdom, in the growth of plants, in the design of the Universe.
These works are based on the square and its diagonals to determine the position of the various elements: all the alignments are the result of a geometric/mathematical calculation that leads the composition to be visually harmonious.
