solo exhibitions:

2012
Vertigo of Reality, curated by Gabriele Tinti, text by Luigi Fassi, Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona, Italy (catalogue Allemandi & C. ISBN 978-88-422-2104-3)

2010
Fetish Club, P74 Center and Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia

2005
Corpi di reato, text by Laura Garbarino, Galleria Fuorizona Artecontemporanea, Macerata, Italy

2010
Maja Megla, Transformacije v nove zgodbe, Delo (07/04/2010), Ljubljana

2005
“Corpi di reato” di Cristiano Berti, Corriere Adriatico (21/10/2005) ● Laura Garbarino, Corpi di reato, exhibition leaflet, Fuorizona Artecontemporanea, Macerata

Laura Garbarino – Corpi di reato

In the time and age of Big Brother and “reality shows”, passed off as “live” truths, where public and private sphere are so mingle to lose interest, we find Cristiano Berti’s work. Berti’s research does not concern the private sphere, doesn’t draw from his personal history, nor from the literary and the romantic world, but seems to be the obsessive record of fragments of lives with a taste for the noir.
In Corpi di reato, Berti lessens his interference between the object and the work of art by exhibiting pure “ready made” tools once used to burgle, steal, escape. A bicycle – which from as far back as Duchamp to Cattelan has a long standing history – a rucksack and an electric torch, 20 rubbish bags, a nail-clipper, a crowbar, chisels and various tools have been arranged on pedestals in the exposition area.
The objects that Berti uses in this work come from and have in actual fact been used in real burglaries. He, infact, buys those tools in judicial auctions. The way he purchases and takes possession of them I think it’s a very meaning element of his making art. He draws an imaginary story that is never really revealed.
The mystery chains the imagination deriving from the events directly to the objects, which takes us in an obsessing curiosity of how, who, and why these tools were used.
A path the artist had already taken with Prestige in 2002, which saw a series of suitcases rescued from Lost Property Offices, sealed and never opened, containing a story/history, an identity and a journey – work that takes me back to Zoe Leonard and her old suitcases piled one on top of the other which tried to recall the portrait of the life of a single person. Although Berti’s style is much more impersonal and conceptual, it cannot ignore a history, a narrative.
This work comes accompanied by another piece titled Rogo Api: 2 live-sized panels in laminated plastic reproduce the handbill with the headlines of two newspapers , Corriere Adriatico and Messaggero, reporting the same piece of news by simply inverting two words. His attention is now focusing on the language structure and its effect on the social communication without forgetting his fetish attitude. Berti inserts his research on the boundary between the scientific analysis of a fact and his interpretation once these facts have been fixed in an artistic frame. As Jacques Lacan writes, “the relationship between the eye and what one wishes to see is deceptive” and Cristiano Berti’s work reveals just how partial this relationship can be.