In Gianni Cella's "Personalità multiple" (“Multiple personalities”) we see represented the interiority of the adolescent, his alter ego that the artist embraces to observe the world with an immature eye but also free from all preconceptions. This explains the coherent approach to the figure, disproportionate, fragmented, necessarily cheerful even when it undergoes any sort of mutilation or modification of the body. The child-adolescent sees alien and cartoon figures emerging from his skull, as if climbing onto his shoulders. Climbing onto someone else's shoulders is reminiscent of childhood games even if the multiplication of human beings is a symbol of mass society, of depersonalization and oppression.
The interior takes on a plastic shape, giving thickness to ghosts by equipping them with a plastic relief. Often the representation of the subconscious takes us to dark and unexplored places. Cella, on the other hand, manages to give a playful and colorful shape, without frightening but rather attracting the attention of the beholder. And to do this he turned to a rather unusual technique in the world of art: fiberglass. Cella chose this material as it is easily adaptable to free modeling because it works like clay. In traditional sculpture, the manual sign takes on material and visible substance, while fiberglass transforms the works into creatures with soft and continuous contours, sometimes alien, impersonal and, perhaps, precisely for this reason, universal.
He feels he is a loser, he feels inadequate, the effort to paint well, to sculpt well is useless. His art takes up popular elements, it takes up, in some ways, their ingenuity. Therefore, Cella wants to awaken in us too the child who rests in our past and to do this he excites us, involving us in an ironic and pleasant space. But beware that his pop universe, lively, colorful, almost crystalline, describes with great clarity the contemporaneity, the empty and hallucinated culture of "mass culture", the difficulties of man to overcome his own sense of inadequacy and the difficulties of relating to others. Cella seems to suggest to us that our identity has definitively changed: we live eternally and immensely in general happiness even if we are all the same, uniformed in the name of a conformism that is the attendance to participate in the spectacle of an optimistic society by statute.
The characters of Cella «can be defined as figural and conceptual aphorisms, as each of his works offers itself as a decentralized, plural, restless thought, which continually escapes the one-sidedness of behavior, and strikes the very myth of "truth ", forcing thought to to go further, to abandon any stable certainty» (Marisa Vescovo, 2005).
Cella, living his work with a corrosive irony, an anarchic humor, basically tells us that today's man personifies a childhood that governs his life forever, which necessarily takes shape by playing.
For more information about the work and the artist:
www.giannicella.it
Contacts:
gnncella@gmail.com
officesostampa.giannicella@gmail.com
