In Cemento Veritas
Paintings + storytelling by Mario Loprete.
Catanzaro 1968 | Graduate at Accademia of Belle Arti, Catanzaro (ITALY)
“I live in a world that i shape at my liking, throughout a virtual pictorial and sculptural movement, transferring my experiences, photographing reality throughout my filters, refined from years research and experimentation. Painting for me is my first love. An important, pure love. Creating a painting, starting from the spasmodic research of a concept with which I want to send a message to transmit my message, it’s the base of my painting. The sculpture is my lover, my artistic betrayal to the painting. That voluptuous and sensual lover that gives me different emotions, that touches prohibited cords…
The new series of works on concrete it’s the one that is giving me more personal and professional satisfaction. How was it born? It was the result of an important investigation of my work, the research of that “quid” that i felt was missing. Looking at my work in the past ten years I understood that there were semantics and semiotics in my visual speech, but the right support to valorize the message was not there.
The reinforced cement, the concrete, was created by two thousand years ago by the Romans. It has a millenary story, made of amphitheaters, bridges, and roads that have conquered the ancient and modern world. Now it’s a synonym of modernity. Everywhere you go and you find a concrete wall, there’s the modern man in there. From Sidney to Vancouver, from Oslo to Pretoria, the reinforced cement it’s present and consequently, the support where the “writers” can express themselves it’s present.
The successive passage was obvious to me. If a man brought art on the streets in order to make it accessible to everyone, why not bring the urban in galleries and museums? It was the winning step to the continuous evolutionary process of my work in that “quid” that I was talking about before and that is what is making me expose in prestigious places and is making me be requested from important collectors. When the painting has completely dried off, I brush it with a particular that not only manages to unite every color and shade, but it also gives to the artwork the shininess and lucidity that the poster,that each and every one of us had hanging on the wall, has.
For my Concrete Sculptures, I use my personal clothing. Throughout some artistical process, in which I use plaster, resin, and cement, I transform them into artworks to hang. My memory, my DNA, my memories remain concreted inside, transforming the person that looks at the artworks a type of post-modern archeologist that studies my work as they were urban artifacts.
In the past few years, I freed myself from all of the work relationships with galleries that I collaborated with. I think that my work has reached the maturity to covet and to be represented from an important gallery and I would like to use your art project in order to make it be known to who sees this in my project.”
