Simone Berti was born in Adria in 1966.
A sense of precariousness and suspension, of alienating surreality, runs through Berti’s work, as the artist himself affirms: “my work takes its direction from the faith that I have in uncertainty: the condition of doubting as a tool for knowledge”.
He constructs possible utopias and modern fairytales through unexpected apparitions. A rendering visible of the representations of the mind seems to form the foundations of Berti’s work.
For his one-man show at the Vistamare gallery the artist is presenting drawings in graphite and sanguine which dialogue with three large sculptures, constructed in reinforced concrete which act as supports for elements taken from nature, forming architectures that tend towards the idea of the monumental. Structures that sink their roots into the history of art and architecture, from Modernism to Sironi, arriving as far as the sub-culture of literary science fiction.
In the drawings the artist has chosen sanguine to represent an entire poetic imagery, a world balancing visionary rurality and the vindication of slowness, cultured references and folk narratives.
While for his works on paper the artist turns to classical technique, in the sculptures he utilizes construction materials, reinforced concrete and aluminium shavings, remnants of production that, in order to become the protagonists of his work, are produced on purpose, using a lathe.
Architectures poised precariously, somewhere between glorifying building sites and mechanics’ workshops, welling out of a science-fiction romance and belonging to a world that is clean and rigorous in form. The monumental aspect and the weight of the cement evoke a force that goes beyond the physical, concentrating in their – eternal – immobility, a powerful potential energy. Painting the thick trunk of a thousand year-old tree is like transferring to the work a part of the history of the world, the sculptures in cement and aluminium and the sanguine drawings live amid the same majestic dignity and profound wisdom.