by Mario Loprete
Painting is MARIO LOPRETE‘s first love. An important, pure love. The foundation of his painting lies in creating , starting from the spasmodic research of a concept through which he wants to transmit his message. Sculpture is his lover— his artistic betrayal to painting— Avoluptuous and sensual lover that inspires different emotions which strike forbidden chords.
For his concrete sculptures, he use his personal clothing. In his artistic practice, he uses plaster, resin and cement, and transforms articles of clothing into artworks that can be hung. His DNA and his memory remain inside the concrete, so that the person who looks at these sculptures is transformed into a type of postmodern archaeologist, studying his work as urban artifacts.
He likes to think that those who look at his sculptures, created in 2020 ,will be able to perceive the anguish, the vulnerability, the fear that each of us has felt in front of that planetary problem that was COVID-19. Under a layer of cement are the clothes in which he lived through that nefarious period.
The clothes that survived COVID-19 are likened to what survived after the 2,000-year-old catastrophic eruption of Pompeii, which recounts man’s inability to face the tragedy of broken lives and destroyed economies.
Inklette Magazine 