Valerio Berruti

Ancora una volta (Once Again) is composed of 10 elements that, like luminous photograms, light up one after the other and then remain lit simultaneously for a few moments, in a sequence reminiscent of the techniques for creating animations, a process dear to Valerio Berruti. 

It is precisely this sequence that provides the image with the necessary mobility to evoke the leaps of a child’s game that takes place over the heads of passers-by, with whom the profile of the crouching child seems to interact. The same subject is featured in the animation work Udaka, which was made in the same months of 2012 to be screened on Lake Nirox, Johannesburg.  

The work of Valerio Berruti (Alba, 1977) is populated with childlike figures drawn with few strokes, leaving out details to bring out the simplicity of forms. Sometimes depicted alone, these figures often appear in family groups, so much so that critic Marco Meneguzzo has spoken of “bourgeois anthropology”, not least because of a certain sense of nostalgia that his works arouse. 

The general public got to know Berruti in 2004 when, thanks to the Pagine Bianche d’Autore award from the Piedmont Region, one of his works was printed on the cover of the phone book, thus achieving a wide and unheard of circulation for a young artist. In the same year, he won the prestigious International Studio and Curatorial Program residency in New York and participated in the Venice Biennale in 2009, subsequently exhibiting in international galleries, museums and art centres. 

His childhood-related imagery, initially expressed in painting and drawing, then developed into sculpture and the language of film, with video and installation projects such as La giostra di Nina (MAXXI, Rome, 2019) and then extended to an environmental and urban scale, as in his recent intervention in Alba (2022). 

The artist's recent solo exhibitions include: Art Square - Felissimo Museum in Kobe, Japan (2021) and Teagan Space in Youyi Bay in the Beijing district of China (2024).    

Silvia Maria Sara Cammarata