At Art Basel Unlimited 2024 Cardi Gallery is proud to present “Progetto per la pace”, an impressive installation by Italian artist Mario Ceroli.
Originally conceived in 1969, Progetto per la pace is among the artist’s largest and most significant works of environmental sculpture. Having originally rose to prominence in the early part of the decade with the Roman Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, Ceroli spent years mastering his characteristic use of wood as a sculptural material. Aligned with the emerging trend of Italian Pop Art, his early works appropriated popular and commercial imagery as well as traditional elements derived from the Renaissance.
By the mid-1960s, Ceroli had taken his first steps toward a more theatrical, process-based practice, which prefigured many of the material and conceptual concerns of the Arte Povera movement. 1968 was also the year Ceroli began designing large sculptural pieces for the stage, notably for the Teatro La Fenice in Venice and Teatro Stabile in Turin. The immersive nature of theatre and opera has had a deep influence on his sculptural practice ever since.
Made up of an expansive area of soil dotted with silk white flags, Progetto per la pace towers over the exhibition space. Its 365 flags, each one manifesting a vision of peace for every day of the year, invites viewers into a timeless space of openness, possibility and dialogue. The white flag, traditionally a symbol of surrender, here becomes inverted and repurposed as an object of agency; a blank, colourless emblem that carries no national symbol, and rejects any form of territorial demarcation. Crucially, the title of the work is open to interrogation – artist and viewer are joined in a communal “project for peace”, yet this is ultimately a fragile and precarious endeavour. Ceroli’s work translates the temporal duration of a single year into a spatial dimension, one which reveals itself as finite. The result is an installation that is at once monumental and delicate, wavering between the peaceful assertion of the title and the underlying knowledge of human fallability
