Manuele Cerutti: QUEM GENUIT ADORAVIT

In Collezione Maramotti’s Pattern Room, Turin-based painter Manuele Cerutti is presenting QUEM GENUIT ADORAVIT, a new group of paintings and works on paper developed specifically for this original project.

Drawing inspiration from simple, yet intense personal experiences – fatherhood, and the first few years of his son’s life – Cerutti depicts the generation of an entity that unexpectedly takes on childlike attributes: an unconscious, almost involuntary creation informed by the vegetative experience of plants and (in the tradition of alchemy) minerals. 

For years now, this artist has been giving painted form and performative presence to the ordinary objects – sometimes mutilated or fragmented, always stripped of their original function – that fill his studio: an old coffee pot, twisted sticks and tubes, bits of plastic, chicken bones, stools, palettes, buckets and jars of all kinds. They take on central roles in “unstill lifes” where details from the everyday world, recomposed in new ways, become expressions of a suspended, primal, even sacred time.

A recurring image in the exhibition is a piece of black plastic landscape fabric knotted around the leg of the human figure who appears in the works. Almost a natural extension of his body, this binding alludes to marcotting, or layering: a technique that creates new plants by encouraging root growth at some point in the stem or branch of the original one. 

The catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition will feature texts by sociologist Gian Antonio Gilli, by poet and writer Valerio Magrelli and by Elena Volpato, curator and conservator at GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin.