“Why wake up?” is a joint, four-handed project that was born for the exhibition held at the Mannheimer Kunstverein Martin Stather in 2006 and revived in 2007 for the homonymous exhibition at the Gattinara Arte ed Altro Gallery. For the Ancient Washhouse it was further developed by involving two of the four cosmogonic elements, namely the air space of the attic and the running water of the tub.

The sleeping and colored "Heads" of Cella are gently lying on the clouds where in the past Bonomi had placed his many “Dreams” and “Castles in the air”. Other red and blue heads emerge on the surface of the water, always sweetly dormant and as real witnesses of an "Underwater World”¹ previously imagined and only plastically represented by the artist. If We are made of the same stuff dreams are made of² what are we made of? we ask ourselves in front of this work that returns all the enchantment of the time we spend in our dream "second life".

In this work there is a memoir of the Muse endormie³ by Brancusi, an assonance of meaning, but one immediately realizes the totally different plastic dimension. The features do not emerge by barely hinted at movements of the surface as in the Muse but by a modeling that the resin deliberately renders anti-figurative, perhaps anti-graceful⁴, certainly contemporary.

Through tangible forms, fiberglass sleep is represented in its relationship with polyester dreams in a game of references that make us ask: "why wake up" if, as Baudelaire⁵, says, better than life / it is certainly sleep, a sweet sleep like / the death?

Fabrizio Parachini

¹ Gianni Cella had already thought about the immersion of his characters in a liquid world in "The spirit of the lake" but above all he made a kind of certification with "The underwater world of Gianni Cella" for the MAS in Ravenna in 2021.

² William Shakespeare, The Tempest, act IV, scene I.

³ Costantin Brancusi, La Muse endormie (Sleeping Muse), 1910. Version in bronze and white marble.

⁴ The reference is to the painting by Carlo Carrà Antigrazioso, Child, 1916.

⁵ Charles Baudelaire, Le Léthé, in: Les Epaves, Paris, 1866.