...In any case, desires and protests, thoughts and nostalgia which obsess the artist's mind, but which are always expressed as art, with nobility of colour, with rigorous and vigorous drawing, with a strong and balanced architecture of space, thus becoming pleasure and aesthetic function as well as meditation, which is, substantially, the task of any true painter.

Armando Nocentini

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..His need constantly to fight against adversity, not only the adversity of destiny but also and above all that created by the works of Man, has notably influenced even the syntax of this serious painter; and little by little it has formed within him a personal literature which is impregnated with poetry. The images feed this poetry, which takes its inspiration from the day-to-day environment; from this Cerrai gleans both unequivocal and contradictory signs one by one. He succeeds in trasforming the stimuli from his daily life into a song veiled with sadness which reaches into and strikes the sensitivity of whoever leads this existence, like him, with the sublime strength of hope.

Tommaso Paloscia

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...It is just this atmosphere that the virtue of Cerrai's painting lies.
Rather than in the situations themselves, which draw on a long tradition of painting and have become familiar, or only faintly surprising. The virtue, then, is in the quality of the layout, in the analytical tenour which arranges the images, in the unreal light which reveals these images and transports the whole to a supernatural sphere.

Elvio Natali

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...The stupid algidity of modern criticism tends to frown on cowtowing to ideologies, be they of the most intimate and the deepest kind, which underlie a painting. Be that as it may, there should at least be some respect for the truth. That is the least that is owed to Cerrai when looking at one of his paintings. The least, because it is impossible to remain indifferent to the emblematic clarity of his symbols.

Renzo Margonari

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...Ivano Cerrai is a painter who can put the architecture of his spaces in order by joining hyperrealistic precision to surreal invention using that extraordinary brightness which characterizes his style and is able to blow the symbols of a fragmented but limpid daily life in the air.This chromatic cleanness exalts his provocative precision in contrast with the present chaos in which nothing seems to correspond to an exact level of values.

Dino Carlesi

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..But one sculpture, named VENUSIANA, is worth to be mentioned; and here I am going to satisfy this need, for I think it is Cerrai's masterpiece. Shaped with purple earth, the female figure develops in an abnormal distribution of empty spaces which are not due to the destruction of 'full spaces' but to their rotation or, let's say, their overturning determining transfers and different placements into the same work structure. It results in a peculiar confluence of sensations which seem to be inspired by some expressions by Dalì or Max Ernst but that, on the contrary, reaffirm a new and autonomous way made up by Cerrai.

Tommaso Paloscia