Mario Ceroli (1938) - Profili di donna

Mario Ceroli (1938)
"Profiles of a Woman"
lithograph on paper, cut and glued 79/90 copies
100x70 cm
contemporary frame 75x103x8 cm

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, by mistake or serendipity:

“My father and my mother wanted to make me a state employee (…) they enrolled me in the Galileo Galilei School, which has three sections: the Technical Institute, the Industrial Technical Institute, and the Institute of Art. One morning my mother took me there. She was afraid of taking the elevator, so we went up on foot. On the first floor there was 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, creation of objects, environments, and set design. Ceroli is a multifaceted, mercurial, versatile artist. Complex, one might say, as any artist is, 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 deserved for his work in theater: here too sculpture and set design fuse to give life to majestic stages.

His sculpture is more construction than shaping; forms are tangible concepts and never abstractions. It is almost always about simple, objective, concrete ideas. In his use of bronze, the resulting idea is a series of stratifications, of successive planes, that do not grant the work a character of plastic uniformity, even within a harmonious and in-tune whole.

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

“This idea that I am a sculptor of wood is not true at all, because I have had experiences with many materials: I have used wood, I have made ceramics, I have used marble, I have created things with ice, with water, I have made things in paper, things in cloth.”
— Mario Ceroli

The two thousands saw Ceroli engaged in a continuous blend of natural elements, wood and ash, wood, ash, and gold leaf.

There are works from 2007 such as La nuda verità (The Naked Truth), Guerriero Frentano: human figures carved in wood and scattered with ash, symbolizing the human being merging with nature. 2007 is also the year that saw the realization of the majestic Paolo e Francesca, with the reappearance of the staircase motif: human figures rise on a staircase, at the foot heaps of colorful color.

Today Mario Ceroli lives in Rome with his family.