Steel, aluminum, wood, plaster, 1 LCD, 1 video DVD PAL - Series 1/3 + 2AP Dimensions according to the space Courtesy of CRISTIANO CERETTI, ISTITUTO DI CULTURA ITALIANA A SAN PIETROBURGO, BIENNALE VENEZIA 54

Pinocchio are going to the Smolny. - - Smolny - public building in St. Petersburg, constructed between 1806 and 1808, by Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi. Smolny is a clear example of a neoclassical Palladian building. Nothing unusual in the fact that Milanese Cristiano Cheretti, who has received awards from the master class in St. Petersburg last year, has chosen for his work the doll Carlo Collodi – Pinocchio, in this symbolic place of Russian power. Smolny, in fact, after reorganized as the Institute for Noble Maidens, became the residence of the Provisional Government of the Bolshevik Revolution, and then the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and currently is the home of the City Administration of St. Petersburg. Symbolically, that Vladimir Putin himself worked in the City Administration at Smolny immediately after the break-up of the Soviet Union and the early years of the Yeltsin Administration under Mayor Sobchak until the mid-1990s. What drives the artist Cristiano Cheretti to connect the meeting of the world's most popular wooden boy with the church authorities, specifically those at Smolny? There is something between them, uniting them – a mutation. Faces of power change each other through the centuries, but Smolny persists with its systematic intonation. Pinocchio, half robot, half man, who is also the essence of the passage, is the transition of nomadic existence - the prototype of the post-human, as we would say today - leads us in the works of Cheretti in a variety of modern Cheretti scenes of urban life and the nature of the city called the Northern Venice. The technology of the works, the painting of the artist, which is processed graphically in the original draft, and then being completed in mixed techniques on canvas with a collage of prints. Patterns and Symbols of fashion houses, as a bold stroke, turn the works of Christiano Cheretti into the unique and inimitable. At the junction of the living and the fictional, but more often on the verge of human and animal worlds, companions of Pinocchio’s adventures, the same mutants as he, hybrids, with their outrageous behavior, pointing to a life among the forests, roads, buildings and places of historical Russian cities. It is no coincidence that the half-human Cheretti puppet, sometimes controlled by a bearded metaphor of the Act and Destiny, is involved in a police beating. The artist cartoonist uses the bright colors that enhance the supernatural feeling from the picture, which are not in opposition to each other in the overall fantasy draft. It is in those scenes with giant anthropomorphic green crickets, when Pinocchio falls into a pit, in the depiction of the funeral-like atmosphere of some of the works of Tolkien and Lewis Carroll. At its peak between the exaltation of violence and the joy of release, a gesture, placing the body on display, the picture is a kind of "Kubrikiany" from Cheretti. In this Trinity, Pinocchio takes the image of a negative character, continuing to move like the main character in A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess's grim history (1962), engraved on the Stanley Kubrick masterpiece film, which was able to note the city's imagination and metaphysical representation of violence. Fancy a hero Collodi, an unrepentant liar and prone to make permanent mistakes, acts as a stubborn critic of the established order, or rather the middle-class respectability and the formalism of the nineteenth century. The historical and social conditions of Smolny have changed significantly since that time: Pinocchio - grown up, the police left behind and formed the KGB jokes which are pleased to experience decomposition. All the same instincts and desires of this new Pinocchio thrown into a universe that does not belong to it culturally - but he recovers the familiar traces of history, at least in part. Impatience and revolt to him - still the roads that lead to happiness, as well as deceit and cunning. However, if Collodi's puppet could forgive all the vicissitudes of his fate by virtue of its genuine nature of the innocent, the statute should be further recognized by Cheretti as a different character, more problematic. Great Mother Russia has accelerated the growth of Pinocchio, sometimes to such an extent that he thinks about death and futility, as deep as the pit from the butchers and crickets. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in a series about Smolny, the subjectivity of the artist is shown with biographical features, more acute than in the past in his other works. Russia - a place where, it seems, according to long-term study, Cheretti meets his true self, continuing to be what it always was. "Pinocchio is in Smolny," if we take an expression of contemporary literary criticism, a kind of painting avtobelletristiki, where the artist is represented with sincerity and irony, without going into itself, but by opening up to different distance to the East: the monster, which is primarily than to be depicted in his or her identity is a sign of things, the truth, the real power that govern relationships between people.