Stefano Cerio
Night Games
June 1 — July 30, 2017
CAMERA — Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, Turin
The Night Games series is the photographer’s continuation of his apparently impartial study on the locations and venues for mass entertainment. The study, which began with his work Aqua Park (2010), continued with Night Ski (2012) and Chinese Fun (2015). Camera will exhibit 12 magnificent pictures, 8 in large format (more than 1 meter high and 1.5 meters wide) and 4 in a smaller format, which all clearly reveal the poetic concept underlying Cerio’s work.
What happens in an amusement park when the lights are turned off? What happens in children’s playgrounds at night? Some answers to these questions, as well as some fascinating images, are presented in Cerio’s work, as he explores the theme of entertainment and recreation, leaving the images he has captured to speak for themselves.
This concept is fully explained in Gabriel Bauret’s introduction to the photobook, published by Hatje Cantz, which reads: “Stefano Cerio is not creating an inventory of amusement parks and nor does he seek to offer shots of some of their themes. Night Games includes many different places and spaces. The worlds created by the park decor are very varied: cinematic, urban, military. every age group is in some way hinted at in the diversity of the parks he photographs. Children are included since one of Cerio’s subjects is public gardens in the center of cities like Paris, with their round abouts and slides for little children. The composition of the photographs is highly restrained. The subject is generally placed in the center and Cerio does not indulge in imaginative camera angles: he almost always chooses a front view. at the same time, he is always careful to include in the edges of the composition items that give some indication of scale. The dimensions of the Parachute Jump, a gigantic flower shaped ride at Coney Island, and the little horse mounted on a spring in a Parisian playground are widely different, but the way in which they are treated does not vary—it is this approach that constitutes the unity of Cerio’s work”.
“Stefano Cerio’s project — Bauret goes on — can be seen as part of this dialectic: his images expressing the artificiality that has taken over our modern world. We may also infer some views on the future of America, particularly in Night Games and the design at Mirabilandia in Ravenna, the latter showing the iconic monuments of Manhattan collapsed and ruined, suggesting an urban landscape fallen into decay”.