Mario Loprete: To What Survived: Sculpture • Cleaver Magazine

Mario Loprete
TO WHAT SURVIVED: Sculpture

For my concrete sculptures, I use my personal clothing. Through my artistic process in which I use plaster, resin, and cement, I transform these articles of clothing into artworks to hang. The intended effect is that my DNA and my memory remain inside the concrete so that the person who looks at these sculptures is transformed into a type of postmodern archeologist, studying my works as urban artifacts.

I like to think that those who look at my sculptures, created in 2020, will be able to perceive the anguish, the vulnerability, and the fear that each of us may have felt in the face of a planetary problem that was covid 19. Under a layer of cement are my clothes with which I lived during this nefarious period — clothes that survived covid 19, very similar to what survived after the 2,000-year-old catastrophic eruption of Pompeii, and capable of recounting man’s inability to face the tragedy of broken lives and destroyed economies.

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Mario Loprete is a graduate of the Accademia of Belle Arti, Catanzaro, Italy. He writes, “Painting for me is my first love. An important, pure love. Creating a painting, starting from the spasmodic research of a concept with which I want to transmit my message — this is the foundation of painting for me. Sculpture is now my lover, an artistic betrayal to painting. It is a voluptuous and sensual lover that inspires different emotions which strike prohibited chords.”