ArtMoorHouse is delighted to present “Armageddon”, an exhibition of Painting by Mariano Chelo.

In the Book of Revelation Armageddon is described as the final confrontation, the great battle between God and the False Prophet’s armies. A war necessitated by the fiendishly evil ambitions of humankind and their evil source of power.

While referring to a specific location, Armageddon carries also the profound symbolic meaning of Apocalypse, seen as the end of the world as we know it.

For Mariano Chelo Armageddon assumes a more personal interpretation, a meaning which is centred on the fear of demise. It is around this very concept that Mariano Chelo develops his entire artistic narrative. A deep inner conflict which is represented in his early works by a figurative and neo-cubist language dominated by heavy, insistent black brushstrokes.

A fear of the existential void appeased by the glimpse of traces of possible life in the final horizon, represented, as for the works on show, by an unlimited space where liquid transparent colours dominate and where red is paramount.

Mariano Chelo's human journey moves us and suggests to us possible existential pathways. It is an imaginary “migration”, a voyage through a deep dark sea, a “passage” towards the unexplored, a metaphor to express our inability to fully know the result of our quests.

It is the duty of the artist – as the Chelo seems to suggest – to absorb the impurities and the pain of the human lives and to render them serene, purified to eyes of those who are able to decode the secret of art.

Mariano Chelo was born in a small town in Sardinia, Italy, in 1958. After graduating from the Istituto Superiore Industrie Artistiche in Florence, he achieved his MA at the Università di Macerata, Italy.

Chelo starts his artistic career in 1969. During this first period the artist focus appears to be on a figurative representation of nature and landscape. Still life and human portraits are in fact the expression of his research on the mysterious adventure of the human journey. Chelo seems to suggest that we are all aware of the transitional aspect of life which, for the bravest among us, as for the picaresque heroes, inspires to seize the boundless opportunities of life.

From 1981 to 1991 Chelo interrupts his artistic career to focus on photography and advertisement. From that experience Chelo sees new languages, an entirely changed artistic prospective that leads the artist towards a new and a more introspective narrative.

From 1992 Mariano Chelo fully re-embraces his artistic career that very quickly leads him to a number of national and international exhibitions and performances with a number of acquisition from public and private collections.

In 2003 the artist sets “Movimenti Artistici Periferici” (Suburban Artistic Movements), dedicating a full building structure, in his native town Bosa, to host Art and Cultural Events from art exhibitions to readings and concerts. Its great success has led, in 2007, to the opening of a new MAP center in Cagliari, the largest city in Sardina, Italy.