Mario Arlati: The Power of Light

Mario Arlati was born in Milan in 1947. After some years of erratic studies, his artistic formation matured at the School of Art in Castello Sforzesco, Milan. Starting in the 1980s, a long series of exhibitions began in Italy and abroad, including Ibiza, where he has lived most of the year since the 1970s. Among the personal exhibitions: Milan, Mantua, Munich, ulm (1985-1986); Suzzara, Ibiza, Barcelona (1988); and also Cologne, Rouselore, Miami (1993), Bern, Paris (1994), San Salvador (1995), Basel, Rio de Janiero, Leverkusen, Madrid (2001), Tokyo (2004).

After a first period in figurative style, Arlati soon found a new dimension, which became characteristic of all his work. In Ibiza, in fact he discovers and makes his own the informal material of the Spanish school which, fused with the wild dimension of the island, gives life to works of great consistency in which Laurea literally moves the matter: lacerations, scratches, layers, colours, but also energy, gesture, emotions, poetry. Arlati’s matter is a representation of his intimate soul, made of feelings, emotions, and landscape’s evocations.

Arlati's “Walls” are a representation of the bright, sunny atmosphere of the island of Ibiza, of the symbiosis created between man and nature and the incessant corrosion from sun, wind and sea on the works of man, which gives life to unique, incomparable objects. His considerable sensitivity becomes unique in the excitement of his wish to reveal or let out the secret of what is hidden in the heart of his works: it divides colours into layers, it blends the materials: in other words, the slow flow of time proposes fragments of wider and more extended stories.