Stefano Cerio at Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto: Metaphysical Images

David Levi Strauss’s temporary publication Why Do We Believe in Photographs dates again to 2021. Although missing a query mark, its title presents a vivid doubt directed at pictures, understood as a mimesis of the true world. It serves as a warning, aiming to display how this apply originates from a historical past not often known as it seems, however as a doubt in regards to the perception in wanting. This theme is developed in Stefano Cerio’s solo exhibition Corpi d’aria, curated by Stefano Chiodi, at present on show at Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto till November 2, 2025. The museum showcases pictures from the Aquila and Brenva collection, named after the landscapes the place they have been taken.

Although these landscapes lack traces of life, Cerio suggests such presence, as it’s exactly the subdued and invisible human motion that’s photographed. Therefore, simply because the melting of the Brenva glacier on the foot of Mont Blanc is brought on by world insurance policies detrimental to environmental safety, the abandoned morphology of the uninhabited territory between Campo Felice, Campo Imperatore and Pescasseroli is populated by inflatable buildings, alluding to a type of synthetic leisure typical of mass tradition. As famous by Stefano Chiodi within the essential textual content of the catalog revealed by Quodlibet, the images are usually not solely a mirrored image on the ecology of a territory but in addition a piece addressing its geographical traumas – each within the gradual melting of the Brenva and in documenting an space significantly shaken by the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake. However, Cerio doesn’t intend to doc however to decontextualize and recontextualize in infinite destabilizing references.

Although the photographer’s apply is deeply tied to reflecting on the sense of place as a bodily entity, he uncovers an solely psychological notion by partaking and disorienting environmental installations of a cerebral world stuffed with a mysterious enigma. Thus, the query raised is how, for Cerio, the aforementioned query by Strauss – derived from the saying “seeing is believing”, first showing in a 1609 manuscript held on the Trinity College Library in Cambridge – is inverted. Therefore, it’s not sure that to find the morphology of a panorama, we should essentially see it in {a photograph}. If the Brenva glacier is now not seen, it doesn’t imply it now not exists, as for the photographer, the whole lot is reconstructible and nonetheless traversable with the eyes. The similar applies to the territories of L’Aquila; the landscapes populated by inflatables are absurd, and though rendered with a chilly meticulousness of objectivity, we’re requested to imagine them true even earlier than seeing them in individual. This creates an ambiguous sense of shock that unites the bodily and the unreal, so the images current themselves not a lot as a implausible act nor as a nightmare, however slightly as a uncooked fantasy, jarring to the attention for its surreality.

This dreamy detachment from the precise, together with the seek for one thing that has disappeared, introduced in a discordance of components, vaguely recollects the incongruity typical of the metaphysical poetics from the Seventies. In explicit, that associated to Giorgio De Chirico’s Fontana bagni misteriosi (1973), a mission devoted to an city sculpture that acutely addresses the connection between the city setting and the now-lost reference to nature. As archival paperwork from the Triennale di Milano recount, De Chirico’s mission is «an instance of a steadiness between the pure and the factitious». Similarly, for Cerio, the true turns into a perform of its illustration, a type of montage during which the picture is conceived from the attitude of data concerning what has morphologically marked the territory and its historical past. Thus, a deadly play begins between relationships: one appears on the advanced but in addition on the macro-realism of pure rocks and lichens, in whose catalog Quodlibet presents an in-depth studying by Riccardo Venturi.

Alternating lyricism and rawness, reminiscence and creative play, an ineffable imaginary is generated, whose utopian energy lies exactly within the montage of inflatables that deflate and bend with the fragility of a boneless physique. Although these plastics are stuffed with compressed air, they bear witness to a dramatically transient actuality, able to die with the prior consciousness that they won’t present amusement for any baby. Thus, the query that arises spontaneously is: why these metaphysical juxtapositions? The reply lies not solely within the aforementioned metaphysical oppositions but in addition in Cerio’s strategy, which reveals the way to be photographers, one needn’t be impartial, nor masters, however have to be seekers, maybe solitary monks with pores and skin delicate to the chilly of Brenva and L’Aquila, with a watch that doesn’t intend to look past however to concentrate on what stays. Therefore, his gaze isn’t so cell; it’s frontal, of vast view, able to analyzing and buying a balanced picture devoid of disturbing components, centered on the important synthesis regarding narration.

It appears Cerio is conscious that his photographic apply goals to disclose, to not save. Yet, there is likely to be a threat of dropping oneself in a piece that would develop into repetitive. However, the photographer doesn’t concern this: in these photos prevails a sluggish narration, typical of a watch that glides gently over the panorama. It is a suspended story of a spot reached by a one-way journey; thus, to the sight, the acrid odor of the earth and the mineral scent of the fog are perceptible, all pure components that find yourself possessing the explanation for a contemplation in the direction of a territorial liturgy of what’s on the verge of ending, in any other case within the section of disappearance. However, within the silence of those photos, one doesn’t search an intimate confession nor an absolute denunciation; it’s slightly a narrative that, unknown as it’s supposed, has been instructed to be believed as it’s seen. Therefore, the overlays and panorama montages, along with developing a sinister metaphysica dimension, push us to ask whether or not the gaze of those that have lived from inside.

Info:

Stefano Cerio. Corpi d’aria
curated by Stefano Chiodi
28/06/2025 – 02/11/2025
Opening hours: Wednesday to Monday 10:30-13:00 / 14:30-18:00
Palazzo Collicola, Piazza Collicola, Spoleto (PG)
www.palazzocollicola.it

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