By Mario Loprete

Artist Mario Loprete has been inspired recently to work with concrete, both as a canvas for his paintings and as a transformative material for creating sculptural objects.

The reinforced cement, the concrete, was created two thousand years ago by the Romans. It has a millenia-old story, made of amphitheatres, bridges and roads that have conquered the ancient and modern world. Now it’s a synonym of modernity. Everywhere you go and you find a concrete wall, there’s the modern man in there. From Sidney to Vancouver, from Oslo to Pretoria, the reinforced cement is present and consequently the support where the “writers” can express themselves is present. The successive passage was obvious for me. If man brought art on the streets in order to make it accessible to everyone, why not bring the urban in galleries and museums?

For my Concrete Sculptures I use my personal clothing.

Throughout some artistic processes, in which I use plaster, resin and cement, I transform them in artworks to hang.

My memory, my DNA, my memories remain concreted inside, transforming the person that looks at the artworks into a type of post-modern archeologist that studies my work as if they were urban artifacts.