Creating contemporary Italian art
Mobili nella Valle
Defined by art critic Achille Bonito Oliva as an archi-sculptor, Mario Ceroli began a three-dimensional transposition of the pictorial composition of Giorgio De Chirico's "Mobili nella Valle" in 1965, a collection of three unusually shaped pieces of sculptural wooden furniture. All the furniture in this collection is made of wood, emphasising the primary element of the raw material and the artist's founding gesture.
Keeping faith with the medieval viewpoint of the artist "faber", Ceroli draws reality and the human environment in each of his representations, moving between reality and fiction, the founding pair of De Chirico's metaphysics.
Under the Master's hands, the design is transformed, even from a purely conceptual point of view. It goes beyond the idea of the work of art as a relic to be observed from a distance and leads the way to the idea of experiencing art, of giving it form and attributing it an authentic meaning recognisable in everyday life.
Objects decontextualised from their original setting can evoke sensations and emotions in us that would otherwise be unthinkable, and so we imagine chairs, cupboards, tables, beds and whatever else comes to mind, dispersed in a desolate valley in the company of the only wind that stirs the vegetation around. If the hands of the artist meet the material, everything around us can become art.
"...there is a sort of relationship with my furniture...the use of raw wood contributes to creating this relationship...for me, furniture is a sculpture created to be touched, to be used. This is the relationship I have with my furniture"
