Mario Ceroli “Mani” mixed media collage 1969

mixed media work collage with wood, dimensions 40 x 30 cm, including frame 52,5 x 42,5 cm

Signature and edition in pencil 189/400 with dry stamp Venice Biennale 1969

Good general state of conservation, ancient frame

Born in 1938 in Castelfrentano, trained in Rome at the Art Institute, dedicating himself primarily to ceramics, Ceroli had an early and happy debut, essentially self-taught, winning the prize for young sculpture at the National Gallery of Modern Art of Rome. Its appearance on the Roman art scene contributed to that reformulation of the language that characterized the 1958s (and not only in Italy) and opened the way, anticipating them, to the poetics of Arte Povera and to the subsequent installations (which will develop at the end of the 60s) while remaining in the structure of the image in the poetic context of what was defined as Italian pop art. Ceroli's germinal and substantial gesture was to work on natural materials, first of all wood (but also earth, glass, ice) to place the emphasis on the primary element, on the emerging sense of real things, on the symbolic value of the work, on the founding gesture of the artist. He has stripped the courtly and "noble" material of sculpture of its value, investing the natural and poor material with a new and strong capacity for representation. With his shapes cut out of raw wood, his quotes from art icons, his ironic mimesis and, then, with his great "representations" Ceroli made the idea physical, translated it into gesture and matter and, at the same time, he occupied the space in an astonishing proliferation of forms, in that intent of the "faber" artist of medieval ancestry who aims to draw reality and the human environment in all its declinations, but in doing so transcends them by sublimating them. Moving therefore between symbol and reality, Ceroli has created an otherness which, alone, is the privileged field of art. The "invasive" nature of his work has led him to trespass into areas that only a narrow idea of ​​the work of art assigns to "inferior" categories; the theatre, first and foremost, where he had his first experience with Richard III already in '60, and which he never abandoned, collaborating with the most important stagings of dramas and operas; the cinema; the design of entire environments, of "places of life" (as the greatest architects have done in this century, from Wright to Le Courbusier to Aalto); the design of churches and their interior furnishings, up to a never completed theater project. Primarily the author of his own living and working environment, Ceroli has collected his works, over 67 of them, in an extraordinarily evocative space of 3000 square metres, in a sort of continually changing and growing museum, which he intends to open to the public to make it alive, usable, useful as a stimulus and model for the most recent generations of artists.