Fragments From Below
Taking the sea as its central concern, the works of Alessio Cerutti (born 1980 in Varese, Italy) bring us into a realm of perception that is never entirely stable. While video and photography are often associated with objective and scientific evidence of the sea and all that it contains, Cerutti instead unsettles such clarity. The presence of marine creatures and underwater life in his works is overlaid with layers of colour, contour, and forms that at times feel strangely unfamiliar. All this serves to underscore how human understanding of the world is, in truth, limited and shaped by bias. Here, what at first appears to be documentation becomes something harder to determine: Between record and poetic interpretation, between data and shadow. What resembles a natural specimen may be read as a form verging on abstraction. The sea, in Cerutti’s eyes, is not merely a landscape, but a space that both holds and withholds certainty. The deeper we look into it, the clearer it becomes that what we see is never whole. This exhibition also carries an ecological inflection. A diver and devoted ocean enthusiast, Cerutti draws on his long experience with the underwater world, including his involvement in coral reef conservation efforts in Bali, where he lives. Yet he is not interested in translating that experience into mere illustration. For Cerutti, art is part of an ongoing attempt to rethink the relationship between humans and nature: That the sea is not an unlimited space to be exploited; that human life and ecological preservation are deeply interdependent; and that the beauty of the ocean always stands alongside its fragility.
