Mario Ceroli (1938) - Profili di donna

Mario Ceroli (1938)
"Profiles of a Woman"
lithograph, carved and pasted on paper 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, whether by mistake or serendipity:

“My father and mother wanted to make me a civil servant (…) they enrolled me in the Galileo Galilei School, which comprises three sections: the Technical Institute, the Technical Industrial 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, the mother was tired, she stopped and enrolled me in that Institute.”
— Mario Ceroli

Ceroli’s work spans sculpture, painting, drawing, the making of objects, environments and scenographies. Ceroli is a polyhedral, mercurial, versatile artist. Complex, one might say, as any artist, yes, but with that extraordinary ability to mix every art. It is difficult to separate a sculpture from its painterly aspect, the furnishings from sculpture and from images.

A separate biography would deserve to be written for Ceroli’s activity with the theater: also here sculpture and scenography blend together to bring to life majestic stages.

His sculpture is more a construction than a shaping, the forms are tangible concepts and never abstractions; it almost always concerns simple, objective, concrete ideas. In the use of bronze, the resulting idea is a series of stratifications, of consequential planes, which do not give the work a character of plastic uniformity, even within a harmonious and tonal work.

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 a first ceramics exhibition in 1958:

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

The years 2000s see Ceroli engaged in a continual fusion of natural elements, wood and ash, wood, ash and gold leaf.

There are works from 2007 such as La nuda verità, Guerriero Frentano: human figures carved in wood and sprinkled with ash, symbolizing the human being merging with nature. 2007 is also the year that sees the realization of the majestic Paolo e Francesca, with the reappearance of the staircase motif: human figures loom on a staircase, at the feet piles of colorful color.

Today Mario Ceroli lives in Rome with his family."