One Gallery, Two Exhibitions
Two renowned contemporary artists will fill the Yavapai College Prescott Art Gallery this summer with hip-hop dancers painted on empty cement bags and large panel drawings made to look like ruled notebook paper from junior high.
Italian artist Mario Loprete’s In Cemento Veritas and Phoenix-based artist Jeff Del Nero’s Motivated History will run from June 6 through August 4, 2023, part of the YC Gallery’s occasional One Gallery, Two Exhibitions Series.
An opening reception on Friday, June 23, 5pm – 7pm, during Prescott’s popular Fourth Friday Artwalk event, will offer the chance to meet Jeff Del Nero and discuss his artworks.
The exhibitions are free and open to the public!
Mario Loprete - In Cemento Veritas
An internationally celebrated artist from Cantanzaro, Italy, Loprete created much of his new work specifically for Yavapai College, even incorporating the green-and-yellow YC logo into his concrete-and-clothing sculptures and playful break-dancer paintings on empty concrete bags.
“Cement is used as a color to paint my B-Boys, using the bag that contained it as a support,” explains Loprete, a graduate of the Accademia of Bell Arti in Cantazaro. “The dancers whirl sinuously on the surface and become an integral part of the bag's graphics and communication, so that the bag itself becomes a work of art not only in terms of content but also on an aesthetic level."
Loprete uses his own clothes and shoes to create his concrete-and-clothing sculptures, which he says is a strategy to connect with his audience across space and time.
"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 archaeologist studying my work as urban artifacts."
Loprete's exhibition includes small ice-cream and angel sculptures made of concrete, and a series of Hip-Hop dancers painted on unused McDonald's bags.
Mario Loprete “Yavapai”
Mario Loprete “YC”
Mario Loprete “YC”
Mario Loprete “Ruff”
Mario Loprete “Yavapai College”
Mario Loprete “Ruff”
Mario Loprete “Ruff”
Mario Loprete “Ruff”
Mario Loprete “You Can”
Mario Loprete “YC Way”
Mario Loprete “YC”
Mario Loprete “You Can”
Mario Loprete “YC Ice Cream”
Mario Loprete “Italians Do It Better”
Mario Loprete “YC T-Shirt”
Mario Loprete “YC T-Shirt”
Mario Loprete “Untitled”
Mario Loprete “YC T-Shirt”
Mario Loprete “Untitled”
Mario Loprete “Untitled”
Mario Loprete “Yavapai T-Shirt”
Mario Loprete “McDonald’s T-Shirt”
Mario Loprete “Untitled”
Mario Loprete “YC Cap”
Mario Loprete “Untitled”
Mario Loprete “Angel”
Mario Loprete “YC Shoes”
Mario Loprete “Untitled”
Mario Loprete “Untitled”
Mario Loprete “Untitled”
Mario Loprete “Untitled”
Mario Loprete “B-Boy”
Mario Loprete “B-Boy”
Mario Loprete “B-Boy”
Mario Loprete “B-Boy”
Jeff Del Nero – Motivated History
Widely exhibited in California, Arizona and elsewhere, contemporary artist Jeff Del Nero uses ballpoint pens and other inks and paints to make his mysterious, collage-like paintings on large panels, which are first lined and drilled to look like the white, three-hole ruled paper we all remember from school. The result is a thrilling brew of the surreal, the symbolic, and the nostalgic.
"My latest work . . . alludes to paper from my youth," says Del Nero, who grew up in California's Central Valley but has been creating and teaching art in Phoenix for more than 25 years. "My motivation of format has been to revisit the paper available when I was young. These results help speak to a newer reality."
Del Nero says that in his recent work he has been "occupied with communicating the space that exists somewhere between art and science, a place where humanity can be defined."
Many of the panels include the silhouette of a kind of everyman, which Del Nero says is influenced by images in old science textbooks, and is an "avatar of the algorithms and software that reductively compile our personal ways and attributes into a concise collection of information."
Jeff Del Nero “Grunge Wall Man”
Jeff Del Nero “Knowledge”
Jeff Del Nero “The Meeting”
Jeff Del Nero “Ex-Eden”
Jeff Del Nero “Math Lesson, A Tale of Two Cities”
Jeff Del Nero “Blue Star”
Jeff Del Nero “Man Made”
Jeff Del Nero “Red Silhouette”
Jeff Del Nero “Market”
Jeff Del Nero “Accidental Monster”
Jeff Del Nero “The Rest”
Jeff Del Nero “A Conference”
Jeff Del Nero “Ominous Anonymous”
Jeff Del Nero “Delft Man”
Jeff Del Nero “Time Out of Mind”
Jeff Del Nero “The System”
Jeff Del Nero “Iron Man”
