Mario Ceroli (1938) - Profili di donna

Mario Ceroli (1938)
"Profiles of a Woman"
lithograph on paper, cut and pasted 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 civil servant… they enrolled me in the Galileo Galilei School, which includes three sections: Technical Institute, Industrial Technical Institute, and Institute of Art. One morning my mother took me there. She was afraid of the elevator, so we went up on foot. On the first floor 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 scenographies. Ceroli is a multifaceted, mercurial, versatile artist. Complex, one might say, like every artist, yes, but with that extraordinary ability to blend every art. It is difficult to separate a sculpture from its painterly aspect, the furnishings from sculpture and from images.

A separate biography would be deserved for Ceroli’s activity with theater: here too sculpture and scenography merge to give life to majestic stages.

His sculpture is more about construction than molding; the forms are tangible concepts rather than abstractions, usually simple, objective, concrete ideas. In his use of bronze, the resulting idea is one of layers, successive planes, which do not give the work a character of plastic uniformity, even within a harmonious and attuned 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 exhibition in 1958:

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

The early 2000s saw Ceroli engaged in a continual blending 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 sprinkled with ash, symbolizing the human being blending with nature. 2007 is also the year that witnessed the monumental Paolo and Francesca, with the reappearance of the staircase motif: human figures rise on a staircase, at the foot piles of colorful color.

Today Mario Ceroli lives in Rome with his family."