Smolny is the public building in St. Petersburg, built between 1806 and 1808 by Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi, the evident cast of neo- classical buildings of Palladio. It is not so unusual, therefore, that Cristiano Ceretti, already awarded in recent years at the Master Class of the city on the Neva, harbors no less than the puppet of Carlo Collodi - Pinocchio - in to the symbolic place of Russian power. Smolny, in fact, after being the institute that girls nobles, became the seat of the provisional government of the Bolshevik revolution, then the Soviet Communist Party, then the city administration of St. Petersburg. Symbolically, Putin himself has worked in the building of Smolny immediately after the coup Yeltsin, until the mid- 90s. What draws post-pop artist Cristiano Ceretti, dall’inedito meeting between the wooden boy world’s most popular, with a temple of power as Smolny? A figure, meanwhile, have in common: they are both, in their way, the mutants. The faces of power will happen over the centuries, but Smolny is the stage on which his masks chase every systematic. Pinocchio, half robot, half man, is also a person of passage, transition, a nomadic existence, upon which a rudimentary wood technology - a prototype of the post-human, we would say today - that Ceretti projects in variegated contemporary scenes of urban life and nature, the Venice of the north. Technology, on the other hand, is the painting technique of the artist, which processes graphically, mouse in hand, their original designs, then rework them in a mixed media on canvas, where the press blends collage. Textures and icons of the fashion houses, such as bold brush strokes, seal the works of Crristiano Ceretti as unique and unrepeatable. At the intersection of humanity and artifice, but more often between humanity and animality, are also the fellow adventurers of Pinocchio, mutant like him, hybrids, unresolved, and yet determined to live, to burn with their behavior outrageous, over the top , forests, roads, local, historic squares Russian metropolis. It is no coincidence that the puppet semi-human Ceretti, sometimes manipulated by a bearded metaphor of Law and Destiny, is also involved in a police beating. On this track, the artist acquires fumettismo vivid shades, which turn into uncanny, only to be restated in terms less confrontational fantasy. This is the case, respectively, of the scene in which the insect green, the giant anthropomorphic crickets, Pinocchio fall into a pit, and the image of a funeral, which reminds some atmospheres to Tolkien and Lewis Carroll. On the ridge between the exaltation of violence and joyfulness liberating gesture, the exhibition of the body, is the picture most of Kubrick Ceretti. In it, a Pinocchio Trinitarian s’atteggia a negative hero, the   protagonist of A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess’s dystopian tale of 1962, from which Stanley Kubrick made the cinematic masterpiece, which has so marked the urban imaginary and representation metaphysics of oppression. Even the bizarre hero of Collodi, unrepentant liar and constantly prone to making mistakes, he served as a stubborn critic of the established order, or rather, of formalism and the nineteenth- century bourgeois respectability. At the Smolny the historical background and social has changed considerably: Pinocchio has grown up, the gendarmes are claims officials formed the KGB, the pranks have become pleasures of dissipation. Yet the instincts and desires of this new Pinocchio is thrown into a world that culturally does not belong - but in which he reconstructs the traces of history at least partly familiar - are identical to those of his ancestor wood. Impatience and revolt are the ways that still lead to happiness, like lying and cunning. However, if the puppet of Collodi could forgive everything, because of his childlike innocence, to the character of Ceretti must recognize a different status, more problematic. The Great Mother Russia has been a spurt in the growth of Pinocchio, to the point that they sometimes linger on thoughts of death and transience, as deep as the pit onto which the crickets-executioners. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in the cycle of Smolny, the subjectivity of the artist emerges with biographical traits sharper than in the past, in other tests, in other works. Russian in the elsewhere, subject to the ongoing trial of the stranger, Ceretti seems to meet his true self, without ceasing to be what it always was. Pinocchio goes to Smolny, if we take a look of modern literary criticism, is a kind of self-fiction painting in which the artist is sincerely and with irony, without then closing in upon itself, but opening up to the other, the distant Orient: a monstrosity that, before being taken locating her, is a sign of things, the truth, the real power relationships that govern the relationships between people. Andrea Sartori - August 3, 2011