Verdad Magazine Volume 31
Spring 2022, Volume 32
Mario Loprete—Concrete Sculptures
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 "Image 11" |
Artist Statement:
Painting for me is the first love. An important, pure love. In creating a painting, I start with the spasmodic research of a concept with which I want to send a message. Transmitting my message is the basis of my painting. But sculpture is my lover, my artistic betrayal of painting, my voluptuous, sensual lover that arouses different emotions and touches prohibited cords…
This year, I worked exclusively on my concrete sculptures.
For the 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. My memories, my DNA remain concreted inside, so the person looking at these sculptures is transformed into a kind of postmodern archeologist who studies them as urban artifacts.
I like to think that those who look at my sculptures, which were created in 2020, will be able to perceive the anguish, the vulnerability, the fear that each of us felt confronting the planetary problem that was Covid 19; and there, under a layer of cement, are the clothes with which I lived through 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.
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About the Artist:
Mario Loprete graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Catanzaro, Italy.