Armageddon

About

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.