Art in the Community presents In Cemento Veritas, an exhibition by Mario Loprete.
Mario Loprete- Artist Statement:
Loprete intends to revive his interest in contemporary art through connecting urban style and hip hop with the Covid-19 pandemic. The revival of old mural painting techniques allows Loprete to study, reinterpret and revive an artist process as distant in time as that of the fresco. In this series, sculptures in reinforced concrete lead us to an ideal of dematerialization of memory. Loprete analyzes “domestic” memory: familiar and intimate memory that he sees as a reality that is ignored in favour of the more intransigent national memory of conflicts.
“Concrete tells a thousand-year history, full of amphitheaters, bridges and roads. Now concrete is synonymous with modernity. Wherever you go, you find a concrete wall: there is the modern world. The artistic question was obvious to me: if we brought art to the streets to make it accessible to all, why not bring the urban to galleries and museums?
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, capable of recounting an inability to face the tragedy of broken lives and destroyed economies.”
Mario Loprete- Bio:
Graduate at Accademia of Belle Arti, Catanzaro (ITALY)
Painting for me is my first love. The frantic search for a concept with which I want to convey my message is the foundation of painting for me. Sculpture is my artistic betrayal to painting. It inspires diverse emotions and strikes forbidden chords. I use plaster, resin and cement to transform my clothes into works of art to hang. My memory, my DNA, my memories remain “concretized” within them.