"The everyday things tell secrets
to whoever is able to look and listen to... "
(From the song "A flower is needed", text by Gianni Rodari)
A white sign, slight and irregular, on a black rectangle. The beginning is where his last show in gallery ended: "True love is like a window illuminated on a dark night ... True love is a lighted calm" - lines by Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti together with the video Blackboard n.0. Few lines to trace the silhouettes of a chandelier. From moving image to actual object; the 19 blackboards, 7 large and 12 small, by Antonio Cervasio, on display at Romberg, are visual writing plays, essential traits write with chalk on the slate surface.
Blackboard is the "teacher" of many pupils, is an ever-present nostalgic memory of the years spent in desks in colorful classrooms. Cervasio makes it his own, and as a child with a pencil and paper, outburst with imagination. It emerges a diverse and lively emotional universe, which echoes with a monochromatic melody - we follow with our gaze the endless tunes of "just piano", we hear the tinkling bells of "alarm clock", we follow "wheel" in his slow path and perceive a puff of the chimney in the navigation of "submarine".
A tribute to the objects as they exist in our childhood memories, with uneven rim, asymmetrical and disharmonic; the painting undresses and remains slight emotional transparency.
His trait is recognizable, a childish and authentic calligraphy that draws with a mindful gesture, intentionally hesitant, yet rigorous and minimal. An infantile form of expression and as such loosen by rules and free to wander through space; a fascinating familiar imagery, magical and unreal on hard stones "canvases" as contemporary cave paintings. The seeming easiness in realizing the work, the masterful grasp of space - enslaved, manipulated, overstepped - give him a sensible incisiveness.
This sensitive and charmed cycle of works resonates of the evocative "scribbles" in white on black by the American painter Cy Twombly, of the romantic memory of the Italian lessons by the German artist Joseph Beuys, of the imaginative and histrionic explanations by the Austrian philosopher and educator Rudolf Stainer; they are the symbols’ forgotten language by the German philosopher Eric Fromm, they are the In heaven and on earth rhymes by the writer and poet Gianni Rodari, they are the primitive materials of minimalist melodies by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. They are small poetry, the objects, the tools living in his hand. They are atomized sentences in which every word is a fragment of the whole, is vital and independent, has its own life.
In nearly 150 years “on duty" the traditional blackboard enabled to tell, structure and clarify the words of the teacher, likewise Antonio Cervasio uses meters of chalk, liters of Attack and kilograms of plaster to evoke, through his peculiar aesthetic realism, the sharp and truthful subjects that are images of a genuine creativity crossed by a smart humor. A journey back in time, a journey in black and white - Blackboards. (Text by Gaia Conti).

opening : Saturday 1st October 2016 at 7 p.m.

mpefm ITALY art press release