The title of the exhibition evokes Hollywood romances and Hallmark celebrations; Cerletty presents us instead with a naked knee at giant proportions, cutting a right angle against a periwinkle ground. This wry, deadpan approach characterises his work: other subjects include a set of gleaming pet bowls, a sink without its taps, and a fresh bar of soap, all unadorned and often stripped of contents or functional components. Giving an initial impression of objectivity, the works provide pieces of a narrative centred on Cerletty’s life, a surrounding of domestic goods and tools of artistic production. Many are continuations of series – the paintbrush, the pencil skirt, and the Kohler basin – framing the same subject in different fields of colour. Others also nod to earlier works: the orange of the American pill bottle finds a parallel in the Manila envelopes of a 2020 painting, an uncanny echo in standard-issue dyes. Cerletty carefully sources images from stock photographs as well as from life, sometimes commissioning professional photographs to capture a composition. He has honed and refined his way of working over decades, becoming attuned to the understated objects which command a charged presence. As he once stated, ‘the images that become paintings have had a lot of pressure put on them over time. They need to hit the bullseye conceptually, emotionally, and as formal oil paintings – and images that do all that are hard to come by.’
