Rehearsal Project in collaboration with Contemporary Attitude presents A boy's closet, a solo show by Stefano Serusi.

Stefano Serusi: A Boy's Closet
October 9 - November 14, 2020
Rehearsal Project, Milan

Through the dreamlike re-enactment of a teenager's room, the artist traces the passing age, expanding furnishings and enclosed spaces. A site specific intervention recreates the everyday life in a room, using objects and peculiar tastes, is now told as a fairy tale. Colors and decorative elements typical of children's bedrooms guide us into Hans Christian Andersen's memory. Vision of a growth interpreted with the filter of the dream, through the recurrence of symbolic elements of the Bildungsroman and the cinema derived from it. Fairy-tale, in the punk reinterpretation of styles and colors typical of the Mannerist period, are also the boy's clothes, made by the stylist Manuel Casati. Hangers, duvets and wardrobes are the result of choices and affections, as of a desire that accompanies the human from infancy to mature age, following the hidden presence of an image in the form of a sentence: “How much of what you love now will you take with you into adulthood?” 

A poem by Contemporary Attitude introduces the project.

Blue and white drapes of the mother:
The room as a control tower;
Now I see:
Impatient waitings are
Control towers over the world.
Waiting, waiting, waiting
A sweet and slow dying
Of my favourite self-scaring traditions.

Oh, blue and white lights of the evening,
Everything is true,
Everything is allowed
In the dreams in which
I touch the windows and the leaves
In between the windows,
And these leaves from the garden and its trees
Make me fly
Under the basement of a
Never known school:
A Few years of celestial reverences.

I step from one tile to another
And step again, stronger
Because I'm filled with a violent happiness.
Someone is talking to me,
Someone is leading my actions
From a misty countryside
Of nude children like me.
I can see adults fooling around
From my spotless room
While I'm eating a blue and white
blue and white ice-cream of caresses:
self caressing.

I'm a real friend to orphans
Orphans sleeping in my bed:
Oh, childish culture,
-Secret pages of sweet virgin creatures;
Pale hands and little eyes:
The echoing of angels-
You went far away from me
While I was searching for
Fate and pain and truth.
Every call is stronger than us,
Every adult is more important
And more in need of pity than us.

Stefano Serusi was born in Alghero in 1980, he lives and works in Milan. The most recent solo exhibitions: "Nuragic alliance" at Spazio E_Emme (Cagliari, 2019) and "MVS€0" at Display (Parma, 2018).

Photo: Maurangelo Quagliarella