Manuele Cerutti, a painter from Turin, presents QUEM GENUIT ADORAVIT at the Pattern Room of the Maramotti Collection, a new corpus of paintings and works on paper specifically developed in an original design dimension.

Starting from simple yet intense autobiographical experiences - his own fatherhood and the first years of his son's life - Cerutti focused on the creation of an entity destined to take on, unexpectedly, infantile features: an unconscious, almost involuntary creation, which draws largely on experience vegetative nature of plants and, in the alchemical tradition, of minerals.

For years the artist has infused pictorial form and performative presence into common objects – sometimes mutilated or fragmentary, always deprived of their primary function – that populate his studio: an old coffee pot, twisted tubes and sticks, plastic scraps, chicken, stools, shovels, buckets and multiform vases become protagonists of living lifes in which the details of everyday life, through new compositions, become interpreters of a suspended, original, at times sacred time. The recurring iconographic theme of the new exhibition is a black plastic mulch sheet knotted around the leg of the human actant depicted in the works. A natural extension of its body, this casing refers to the layering technique, which allows you to obtain new plants by inducing the birth of roots starting from a point on the stem or branch of the mother plant.

This method of agamic reproduction, which occurs through the separation of any part of the body of the parent individual, is linked in consonance with the artist's allegorical and mythological exploration of parthenogenesis, a type of reproduction in which the egg cell is disconnected from the act of fertilization. Against the background of the memory of extraordinary, even monstrous, births in ancient mythology, the individual at the center of Cerutti's story-through-images carries within himself the appearance of the artist who, subjected to a constant process of verification and multiplication, overflow into a universal subject. The subject of these works is afflicted by an inextinguishable wound in the leg: a part of himself that he delicately wraps with the cloth, a fertile wound that he constantly takes care of, an unexpected germinative matter that presents itself as the onset of other lives and directions. This archetypal figure escapes the definition of contemporary hero. Rather, it embodies a divergence from the canon, an interruption of linear development, suggesting a feeling of inadequacy and fragility. An element out of balance - often inserted and suspended in representations so articulated and detailed that they appear real - he attempts, through a series of actions, to assimilate the child's form of knowledge, recognizing a path of possibilities in movement and asymmetrical proceeding.

The territory in which he moves, beyond the interior of the studio, is the landscape on the outskirts of Turin, those places familiar to the artist crossed by entropy where the city begins to hybridize with the countryside, where the rivers flow under the overpasses , industrial ruins mix with uncultivated lands and a concrete underpass can magically transform into a monumental portal landed from a science fiction story. But for Cerutti the territory of exploration is, first and foremost, painting itself, which he defines as a "continuous imprint of doing". Whether it is the subject that summons its own clear appearance on the canvas or the pictorial process, with its layers, the veils and cancellations, to give pace and support to the composition, the uninterrupted research in the pictorial language echoes in the progress of the protagonist of these works, between participation and detachment, merits and faults, attempts at recovery and renunciations: towards the emergence of a inexpressible attachment (to which the title of the exhibition refers, “I adored the one who generated”), it is possible to stumble into amazement, creating new relationships with one's being in the world.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a book will be created with contributions from the sociologist Gian Antonio Gilli, the poet and writer Valerio Magrelli and Elena Volpato, curator and curator at the GAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Turin.