Not Built in a Day

Marité & Joe Robinson Strolling Gallery I
February 7–May 18, 2025

Installation view of Not Built in a Day at Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. Photo by Rachel Alban.

Through a decades-long printmaking practice, Michael Dal Cerro proposes bustling and abundant ecological cityscapes. The title Not Built in a Day refers both to the time he has dedicated to his craft and to Rome, a source of his inspiration, in particular the Italian classical architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi whose Roman work is frequently the subject of Dal Cerro’s etchings. Like Piranesi, Dal Cerro creates fictitious and atmospheric cityscapes, constructed with a sense of order that invokes a time in the near future. The buildings in his prints are interlaced with each other and constructed using bold colors and nonlinear shapes.

Dal Cerro’s cityscapes represent not a utopia but a climate-informed life, as seen in their surrounding rising waters and great attention to flora. He has established a civilization that centers on horticulture rather than erasing it. In many of his prints, bushes and trees fill spaces between and around a metropolis. In a rejection of anthropocentrism Dal Cerro creates scenes absent of people, where human life is implied but is not the focus of his societies. Utilizing vibrant color and spatial relations between architecture and flora, Dal Cerro imagines a populace that has embraced plant life as an active and dominant part of everyday life. His cities are reminiscent of ant colonies and cellular models, emphasizing a oneness between nature and the post-industrial world. He pays close attention to modes of transportation, as seen in the lattice of terminals and trains in his prints, and has drawn upon his own observations while getting around at home and abroad using public transportation, which is considered a point of pride in many societies.

Using acute methods of linocut and woodcut, Michael Dal Cerro creates images of an original yet accessible world whose occupants are aware of climate change and history. He invites the viewer to consider a place informed by socioecological urbanism. This exhibition celebrates the artist’s years of observations of method and material and his dedication to learning across time and place.