Mario Loprete | UPWARD gallery - Discover the world of modern artists and show your creative

SOLO EXHIBITION PROJECT

“IN CEMENTO VERITAS”

THE PROJECT

With the "In cement veritas" project, the artist recognized as a promising talent of the emerging international art scene, intends to revive his interest in contemporary art through the investigation that connects the Urban style and the hip world hop with the pandemic we have been facing for over a year.

After the recent notoriety obtained in Holland, Italy, Germany and the United States of America through public institutional exhibitions, wants to propose his artistic project with a new personal exhibition. The artist, as he has always been, carries on with his works a singular and fascinating visual research, thanks to a deep poetic concept of great impact, uniquely inspired by the Hip Hop culture, but also by the Italian tradition of fresco. And it is precisely through the use of the pictorial image that the artist strives to know reality, tirelessly investigating the territories of human "veritas". Instinct and rigor, thought and practice are closely connected in an intense and metropolitan language, which, through painting, creates images capable of generating meditation on current times.

THE ARTIST

“I live in a world that I model to my liking. I do it through virtual, pictorial and sculptural movements, transferring my experiences and photographing reality through the filters of my mind. 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 search for a concept with which I want to convey my message, this is for me the foundation of painting. Sculpture is my lover, my artistic betrayal of painting, that voluptuous and sensual lover who inspires different emotions that strike forbidden chords.

This new series of concrete sculptures is giving me more personal and professional satisfaction.

How was it born? It was the result of a major investigation into my work. I was looking for that special something that I felt was missing. Thinking back to my work over the last ten years, I realized that there was a certain semantic and semiotic logic "spoken" by my images, but the right support to enhance their message was not there.

Reinforced concrete, concrete, was created two thousand years ago by the Romans. It tells a thousand-year history, full of amphitheaters, bridges and roads that have conquered the ancient and modern world. Now concrete is synonymous with modernity. Wherever you go, you find a concrete wall: there is the modern man.

From Sydney to Vancouver, from Oslo to Pretoria, reinforced concrete is present, and it is this presence that allows writers to express themselves. The artistic question was obvious to me: if man brought art to the streets to make it accessible to all, why not bring the urban to galleries and museums? In this terrible year I have been working exclusively on my concrete sculptures.

For my concrete sculptures I use my personal clothes. During some artistic processes, in which I use plaster, resin and cement, I transform them into works of art to hang. My memory, my DNA, my memories remain concretized inside, transforming the person who looks at the works into a sort of postmodern archaeologist who studies my works as if they were urban artifacts.

Under a layer of concrete are my clothes with which I lived through this nefarious period. I like to think that those who look at my sculptures made in 2020/21 will be able to perceive the anguish, the vulnerability, the fear that each of us felt in the face of a planetary problem that was Covid 19, clothes that survived the pandemic, very similar to those that survived the catastrophic eruption of Pompeii of 2,000 years ago, capable of recounting man's inability to face the tragedy of broken lives and destroyed economies."

CULTURAL LINES OF THE PROJECT

In line with the aforementioned objectives, the project will revolve around an exhibition capable of providing a detailed and meaningful approach to his artistic career.

More than 80/90 works, almost in a documentary way, will demonstrate the work of an artist who blends technical skills and intuition in painting and sculpture to obtain a powerful visual impact, "multicultural" works that tell the stories of contemporary life and global themes , giving a taste of contemporary pictorial production. The exhibition will devote ample space to the works of the artist, a series of works in which the lessons of the past merge with the strength of the contemporary.

The revival of an old mural painting technique allows the artist to study, reinterpret and bring back to the present a procedure as distant in time as that of the fresco. The Concrete series, sculptures in reinforced concrete, seems to lead us to an ideal of dematerialization of memory, above all by analyzing the "domestic" memory, the familiar and intimate one that the artist sees as a reality placed on a lower level of attention in comparison with the most intransigent national memory of conflicts. Through a material body that, progressively becomes rarefied and loses definition, the artist revisits the work of Native American artists such as Jimmie Durham and, through a language of forms made up of free associations, takes us to the images of Boris Mikhailov and the notorious surviving artists to the "cancellation of family memory" by the Russian Communist regime. Through an international language, the Italian artist creates a research path that draws
on the great Italian masters of the past, with the strength of a sign that catapults us into the images of modern life, urban visions and multicultural suggestions. The management of the exhibition will be entrusted to an art curator, who knows artist work very well and will be an important figure with the aim of mediating between the exhibition offer and the use of the public.

The symbolic duplicity of concrete

The Artist indulged his passion for art by attending the artistic workshop of a painter, from whom he learned the tricks of the trade: the technique and the ability to observe what surrounds us. This pictorial ability of him persists in making art and has evolved over the years, also thanks to his academic studies, in a material experimentation between oil pigments and different supports; until it reaches its distinctive element in the use of concrete. Here, while remaining faithful to an expressive medium that recognizes an unsurpassed value in the technical tradition from a historical point of view, the artist has inserted, at the same time, this extra-pictorial element, firstly as a preparation of the canvases, then as pigment to paint with.Him doing reflects that ancient physiological need to work, daily, in his laboratory, on his canvases, a behavior that is usually found only in the stories of great artists, those of the Old Guard, born around the 1950s. And here is our artist who goes "shopping" every day, and whoever wants to meet him should simply knock on the door of his laboratory in Catanzaro and see him concentrating on his work while listening to rap and hip-hop music. In fact, it was his musical passions that brought him closer to the culture and the underground world, at a time when it was not yet popular or fashionable in Italy, and made him choose the subjects among singers, dancers and stars of that genre. so close to street art and graffiti.

The pictorial use of cement differentiates the artist from many other artists, who, starting from the artistic movements of the 1960s, identified it as the number one extra-pictorial and non-naturalistic material. In this case it is ennobled with pigment and, at the same time, in a behavior of aesthetic reconciliation, it is recognized as a globalizing means of modernity. Of course, concrete, being the most widely used building material in the world, becomes a distinctive element of a certain non-beauty that dominates cities; at the same time, however, it is the support most used by that same underground culture dear to the artis, and is recognized as the most prevalent popular art. The artist does not use spray paints or reworkings of the characters typical of writers, but his research is still recognized in that way of thinking and seeing an expanding generation. In the series, the lettering was constructed with three-dimensional concrete shapes and, just like a contemporary Gutemberg, the artist uses a word puzzle. The letter is outside of pure aesthetics, of being only meaningful, and acquires its being a meaning, because it is an integral part with complete meaning, in the composition, of a specific message for the viewer / reader. So the cement was first the ideal support on which to paint the images of the characters chosen by the artist, then, gradually, as the artist experimented with the characteristics of the material, at the same time as the need to get out of the two-dimensionality of the canvas, a series of sculptures of objects and clothing placed on a wall or scattered in space.

Thus, in the Concrete sculptures series, the invasion of the third dimension corresponds to the desire to insert reality into the work; reality becomes the work of art itself, also through the components of time and memory intrinsic to the cemented, often personal, objects used daily. Everything has been collected and entrusted to the ritual of artist art. Each object is meticulously "painted" with concrete, retracing the same gestures that he dedicates to the most expensive portraits, immobilizing them in a hard and gray armor, and transforming them into possible contemporary artifacts. The industrial property, identified for its reproducibility and for its specific destination, through the creative act of the artist, enters into a statute of aesthetic authenticity. Practice that is identified for the first time in the rectified ready-made of the artist Marcel Duchamp. But a later state can also be assumed in these works. The object that has become a work of art is often exhibited in the very places from which it was recovered and returns to be part of reality, alongside the everyday life of its nature. It becomes what Duchamp himself theorized as a reciprocal ready-made (more attributable to the practice of pop art): the work loses, on this occasion, its aesthetic function, approaching, for a moment, its real and starting point. Purpose: “just as it would happen if a Rembrandt canvas were used as an ironing board”. It was then seen how in the artist research there is the sharing of two souls: one ancient and one contemporary. These are reflected in the paradox of his natural distrust of a part of the art world.

DISCLOSURE

Particular attention will also be paid to making contemporary art always accessible to the cultural value and the strictly contemporary aspect of the proposal.

The exhibition will adopt a very aesthetically accurate communication campaign with the aim of presenting and making viral, both online and offline, an exhibition project aimed at enhancing the artistic career of the artist.
The project will be advertised in all:
- creation and design of the graphic image of the event logo;
- a targeted communication campaign with classic multimedia and paper tools

FINANCIAL PLAN

The financial requirement for the project, relating to the costs of communication and advertising, printing of invitations and brochures, printing and realization of the catalog, vernissage, shipping costs of the works to and from Italy, travel expenses of the artist, etc., will be financially covered by public or private sponsorships.