Marcela Cernadas

Ca' Pisani Rubelli, Venice

May 10 - October 10, 2019

Rubelli is pleased to present the Loom exhibition by Marcela Cernadas specially conceived for Ca 'Pisani Rubelli in collaboration with the Michela Rizzo Gallery. On display a series of works form an environmental installation through which the artist proposes the idea of ​​weaving as a figure inextricably linked to the continents where it takes place.

In the choice of the title Loom there is the synthesis that characterizes the works of Marcela Cernadas. A word capable of suggesting the poetic and formal intentions of the proposal which consists on the one hand in intertwining the works of art with architecture and on the other in celebrating fabrics as fundamental elements of the project. Intentions also molded in the graphic choice where in the interweaving of the characters a trespassing of forms and a continuum-like action - that of the tesserae - in the stylized symbol of infinity are recognizable.

The works on display make up an environmental installation that crosses the façade spaces, the historical archive and the showroom with great lightness. The installation "without beginning or end" alludes to cyclicality: another constant in the artist's work. Embroideries, collages and frottages on display are made with carefully selected fabrics from the new Rubelli collection, which on this occasion try to give formal boundaries to a "constellation of petals": now garden, now sky, now garland, now cartouches - with words by Cernadas.

The collaboration between the Rubelli textile company, the Michela Rizzo Gallery and the artist Marcela Cernadas dates back to the long-term project Peneolpe: an association gathered in the recent essay published in Madrid * which traces the performances presented in the Garden of the Gallery in the autumn of 2016 and in the previous Venetian headquarters of Rubelli in the spring of 2017. Two occasions where white linen - one of the artist's favorite colors - had an undisputed centrality. Now from the purity of the whites it ranges towards the lightness of the blues, wisteria and blues, recently appeared in the artist's research and associated with his position "on the ephemeral", stated in his Ephemeral Manifesto - also visible in the exhibition.

Marcela Cernadas

Smeg Store, Via della Moscova, Milano

From 13 to 23 September 2018

Manon Comerio is pleased to present KITCHEN, the new work by Marcela Cernadas conceived for the spaces of the Smeg Store in Via della Moscova. The original Milanese project is organized by Manon Comerio Art Projects and AROMI in collaboration with the Michela Rizzo Gallery.

KITCHEN is the title that the artist gave to his "long-term project" which includes photographs, poetic texts, environmental installations, objects and performances. The central figures of the project are the analysis of still life as a form of representation, of the banquet as a form of convivial art and of the environment where these figures "happen". A recognizable trait in the works of Cernadas, it is the formal synthesis that from time to time surprises us for its symbolic strength capable of declining both towards the sobriety of the monochromes and towards the sumptuousness of the colors. A dialectical and pulsating tension that does not a priori exclude materials as in the case of its impalpable imprints on paper, fabrics or crystal and which for the first time is confronted with the ceramic chosen for this singular project.

In a text by Marcela Cernadas we read:

I have been studying food and its handling for more than a decade; the banquet and its relationship with luxury; nourishment and its indissoluble link with essentiality, rituality and vitality. Many of my works have delved into the fragile balance of still life and many of them were conceived in kitchens. In that border area between everyday life and creativity. The Kitchen project is nothing more than a mirror of that border area which for one hundred consecutive days has returned the shape of the kitchen of my own studio and of the kitchens I lived in during my travels. A form of immediate and convivial expression that pushes me once again to question the meaning of food and the meaning of its aesthetic and social representations.

And in the poetic intentions for the Milanese project he deepens:

In formal terms, in the environmental installation - a frieze made up of seventy photographs printed on ceramic - I collect a series of recurring elements in my works such as the shell and the pomegranate. This frieze recalls the shape of a polyptych which by definition refers to sacredness, a fundamental aspect of my work, made evident on various occasions, especially in the series of triptychs on the flesh. In symbolic terms, I gave the work the title of "kitchen" thinking of this place as the abode of everyday life and as the abode of the divine to quote Heraclicus - who in the process of receiving unexpected guests and struggling with the preparation of food in his kitchen manifestó -: “Come in. Do not be afraid. Here too there are gods ”.

Together with the frieze, created in collaboration with the MORELATO company and the MAAM (Museum of Applied Furniture Arts), an unpublished statement by the artist and a limited series of porcelain plates with the same title will be exhibited.