VROOM VROOM

“During the day fantastic birds flew in the petrified forest and crocodiles adorned with jewels sparkled like heraldic salamanders” – J.G. Ballard, Crystal Forest

Ballardian asphalt has a highway lane that swiftly merges into the metropolitan outskirts (Milan), and neighborhoods of Italian provinces (Faenza), formulating a new zoomorphic jungle, a bestiary of urban typos grafted onto an improbable, yet probable animal paleontology. The discard is embodied in a sound that, as in 1990s Los Angeles, where rap and social revolt, described by Brian Cross, radiates into Mike Davis’ Hip Hop of the “City of Quartz,” and in James Graham Ballard’s own Crystal Forest.

This asphalt suspends into dark skies, where fiery sunsets tear open to become the kilns of pervasive incandescences found in foundry crucibles, it is precisely here that Marco Ceroni’s works are forged.

A blending of a visionary and futuristic vision, an area where alterations, abnormalities, and dystopian fragments are spaces for the creation of GMG, the brand of bronze jewelry, polished with glossy and matte gilding, imagined for gigantic monsters that systematically rebel against the system, and rap in raves among street gangs, like a cyberpunk story.

The street was the upbringing and adolescence of Marco Ceroni and the essence we find in all his works. A work that perfectly understands the morphology of materials, their alchemy, and is destined to establish the strong bond that unites life and aesthetic.

GMC is a brand that does not exist, but was conceived by Marco Ceroni to represent this necessary adornment formed by a ring (with the cubic initials GMG: Giant Monster Jewels), a necklace with a soft chain, and a decorated beehive Grillz, where “violence and preciousness” are a declared choice. Jewelry that becomes sculpture and monumentalizes and idealizes, in their XXL format, a musical and social counterculture.

From Via Privata Oslavia, home of the Battaglia Foundry in Milan, to every other peripheral street traversable between reality and dream.

Lacoste, is precisely what the worn asphalt has given back to the artist’s vision, it’s the missing portion of a reptile, the tail of the crocodile naturally rendered in camouflage, where every ceramic scale has undergone individual modeling. A condition born on a journey, where along the roadway, an abandoned exploded tire imagined in the artist’s mind, blocked and winding movement of the crocodile.

An irreparable tail, a sculpture living between the swamp and the asphalt jungle, as if, literally the Parnassian Shibuya described by William Gibson, had protected and now returned this artifact, for its ability to still be a futuristic place.

Residency at the Carlo Zauli Museum has contributed to the realization of these works that confirm the featuring effect, where the participatory sense installs a collaborative unity between learning and accomplished achievements.

Infact, even SLAG experienced the residency at MCZ, the modified industrial hull of the Booster (MBK) has a sense of being unclassified, despite the toothed image that nods to turbulence and evident zoomorphism. SLAG was formed for that peculiar reactivation that Marco Ceroni implements in his practice, highlighting that sense of the hybrid, a click that is precisely the desired short circuit.

Scooters belong to the idea of adolescence, experience, tribe, and never escaped freedom, and SLAG represents precisely in its modification, the magnificent trophy of that season.

VROOM VROOM, is the onomatopoeic title of this exhibition, and the desire to have the Marinettian matrix, to restore the sound acceleration of this frenetic metropolitan noise, which takes us directly into the Ballardian asphalt, without hesitation, without stops, and until the last breath.

– Chiara Guidi