Mario Ceroli (1938) - Uomo vitruviano

Mario Ceroli (1938)
Man of Leonardo
etching 90 copies
80 x 80 cm with frame 85 x 85 cm
original contemporaneous frame

Mario Ceroli was born in Castel Frentano (Chieti) on May 17, 1938.

He moved to Rome at the age of ten, where he enrolled in the Institute of Art, whether by mistake or serendipity:

“My father and my mother wanted to make me a civil servant (...) they enrolled me at the Galileo Galilei School, which includes three sections: the Technical Institute, the Technical Industrial Institute, and the Institute of Art. One morning my mother brought me there. She was afraid of taking the elevator, so we walked up. On the first floor stood the Institute of Art, my mother was tired, she stopped and enrolled me in that Institute.”
— Mario Ceroli

Ceroli’s work spans sculpture, painting, drawing, the creation of objects, environments, and set designs. Ceroli is a multifaceted, mercurial, versatile artist. He is complex, as one would expect of any artist, yes, but with that extraordinary ability to mix every art. It is difficult to separate a sculpture from its painterly appearance, furnishings from sculpture and from images.

A separate biography would be warranted for his activity with theater: here too sculpture and set design merge to bring to life majestic stages.

His sculpture tends toward construction rather than shaping; the forms are tangible concepts and never abstractions. They are commonly simple, objective, concrete ideas. In his use of bronze, the resulting idea is a series of stratifications, sequential planes, which do not give the work the character of plastic uniformity, even within a harmonious and resonant whole.

Always at the Institute of Art he studied under Leoncillo Leonardi, Pericle Fazzini, and Ettore Colla, where he experimented with ceramics. He held his first ceramics exhibition in 1958:

“This thing that I am a sculptor of wood is not true at all, because I have experimented with many materials: I used wood, I made ceramics, I used marble, I created things with ice, with water, I made things out of paper, things out of fabric.”
— Mario Ceroli

The early 2000s saw Ceroli engaged in a continual blend of natural elements, wood and ash, wood, ash and gold leaf.

In 2007, works such as La nuda verità and Guerriero Frentano appeared: human figures carved in wood and sprinkled with ash to symbolize the human being merging with nature. 2007 is also the year that saw the realization of the majestic Paolo and Francesca, with the reappearance of the staircase motif: human figures stand on a staircase, at the foot colorful mounds of pigment.

Today Mario Ceroli lives in Rome with his family.