In Cemento Veritas
Showing from July 16 - November 27, 2022
Mario Loprete is a painter and sculptor residing and working in Catanzaro, Italy. A graduate of the Accademia of Belle Arti, Loprete has found his artistic voice through the mediums of painting and sculpture. Through research and experimentation, his choice of medium to work with has become: Concrete.
Meet the Artist
Mario Loprete
“I live in a world that I shape at my liking. I do this through virtual, pictorial, and sculptural movements, transferring my experiences and photographing reality through my mind’s filters. I have refined this process through years of 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 transmit my message this is the foundation of painting for me.
The sculpture is my lover, my artistic betrayal to the painting that voluptuous and sensual lover that inspires different emotions which strike prohibited chords.”
—Mario Loprete
Artist Statement
“For [these] concrete sculptures, I use my personal clothing. Through my artistic process in which I use plaster, resin and cement, I transform these articles of clothing into artworks to hang. The intended effect is that my DNA and my memory remain inside the concrete, so that the person who looks at these sculptures is transformed into a type of postmodern archeologist, studying my work as urban artefacts.
I like to think that those who look at my sculptures created in 2020 will be able to perceive the anguish, the vulnerability, the fear that each of us has felt in front of a planetary problem that was Covid-19… under a layer of cement there are my clothes with which I lived this nefarious period.
Clothes that survived Covid-19, very similar to what survived after the 2,000-year-old catastrophic eruption of Pompeii, capable of recounting man’s inability to face the tragedy of broken lives and destroyed economies.”