Giorgio A. Ceccarelli was born in Torino in 1936. He obtained his degree in Architecture at the Politechnic of Milano in 1962. During the following years he furthered his studies both in Italy and  abroad. Following on the academic carrier he obtained the support of a Mellon Fellowship in order to attend postgraduate courses leading to the Master degrees in City Planning and Architecture at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Thereafter he started a long period of experience abroad to deepen his professional, academic and artistic growth.
He lived in England where for a decade he taught city planning at the Institute of Planning Studies of the University of Nottingham.
Beside the academic carrier he continued developing his artistic work maintaining an interest in painting, drawing and sculpting.
He exhibited his work in 1980 and 1981 at the "Summer Exhibition” held by the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Nottingham.
Since 1982 he has been living in Rome running his own architectural practice. As an independent artist he works in his studio searching for the elusive psychological and utopian space where to achieve artistic and material substance resonating his personal horizon and human drama.
The dichotomy of artistic modes, abstract expressionist in most sculptures, verging into the iconographic on one side and the psycho-syntonic and explorative mode in the figurative femscape of the paintings is  more superficial than substantial. The first is more introspective and deeply in contact with the unconscious, the dreamworld the intuitive inspiration and the purpose of artistic composition, confronted in strong dualism with the materic strength and weight of bronze and clay. The second leads into the amazing  world of colours, the softness of the human form and flesh responding to gravity and moodiness with endless diversity. There is an artistic need to empathise with sensuality, through the sublimated interaction with the richness of the feminine promise, its ever-enduring mystery and enticement.
In 1994 he presented his work of drawings and sculptures in a personal show at the Trifalco Gallery in Rome.
He frequently visits the Slade Art School at the University College of London to attend the Live Painting Workshops.
Presently some of his bronzes are on show in the US at the Waxlander Gallery of Santa Fe, New Mexico, whilst drawings, paintings and etchings can be seen at  the Galleria Il Torchio in Rome, Campo di Fiori. Finally samples of his work are available at the Nàdor Gallery in the centre of Budapest.
 

Anthony Brophy: FEMSCAPE

This series of single line drawings presented in full volume seems best comprehensively to express an artistic, human, male love – affair with the female body. All three adjectives take fertile root in dark lines, in imagination, and in the totality of the drawings themselves, where they complement each other fluently and evocatively. Giorgio Ceccarelli is an architect by vocation, a sculpture by aspiration, of the abstract, Expressionist school, and has now produced these life drawings which can be read as exploratory moments of transition, as a new personal attempt at human and artistic synthesis. The passage is from the abstract to the objective or figurative, or from the cerebral to the sensuous, or both of which are contained in, and lead into, each other. There is no trace of ideological or aesthetic unevenness here, no artificiality. The overall pattern is sure and unified. Even the usual process of instruction for students in art schools is interestingly reversed; there is no relinquishing of the past, but rather a consolidation of it. There is an affirmation of personal development and growing vision, which could contain a very valuable lesson for others. Sometimes by going backward we go forwards, both humanly and artistically.
 A rich blend of moods emerges from the hand that does the drawings; by turns wistful, painful, joyful, puzzled, celebratory, but always tentative and delicate, as if unwilling to intrude in any presumptuous, heavy handed fashion on the sensitive texture of the world under exploration. The movement of the hand seems to suggest that often perhaps the hand itself does not know the reason why, so much so that ’mistakes’ are not erased but humbly and movingly worked in, as if to emphasise the sensitive fragility of the search itself. This is the meaning of the endeavour, of the onward exploration of the line in these diverse figure drawings of the female body.
 It is a complex, challenging feminine world that emerges from these simple but strong drawings, a world that expresses the varied wonder and wondrousness of women in their expressions, poses, psychological states, their strength and vulnerability. There are women sitting, lying, smiling, quizzical, defiant, stubborn, arrogant even; the hands are sometimes defenceless, sometimes hesitant, inviting, interrogative, rueful,; the sexual ’parts’, -limbs, buttocks, thighs, breasts, arms, backs, feet, legs, - all blend into an overall unified and organising vision. It is indeed a splendid and suggestively varied ’femscape’, if one dares call it that, that is created by the drawing, moving hand, drawing as close as the requirements of necessary aesthetic distance allow. The balance of ambiguities is masterful. So much so that the overall impression is that of a gentle sexuality, not defensive, not aggressive, coquettishly or egotistically inviting, but open and potentially seductive, in a sensuous, not vulgar way – and yet extremely private also, as if measuring some unexpressed distance between inner and outer worlds, the hidden boundaries between interior femininity and perpetually restless male curiosity, which in this case attempts sympathetically and gently to get beyond the superficial trappings and barriers. The line is steady, even where broken, the shadings secure, suggesting mystery, an interior darkness and depth rising into surrounding, illuminating, outer light.
 Bodies, minds, aspirations, fears, bend against and with the line through a very careful arrangement of light and shading, and the tension between the artist and model becomes a metaphor for the sexual, emotional tension between man and woman, between the artist and the subject matter and material, all expressed here in a celebratory hymn to the female body, that is as sensitive as it is capable, uplifting, decorous and humanly ennobling.
 As if to emphasise both the contrast and the continuity with the past from which these drawings have emerged, there is also an architectural drawing and some pieces of sculpture which complete the exhibition. It is interesting to see them all blend into a homogeneous artistic and human statement. The perspective drawing, a design for a model project of Canberra Parliament House, symbolically expresses a political idea about democracy functioning as in a see-through temple, it is a precise conjugation of classical and romantic themes with strict, exacting requirements woven in. Parliament House is an architectural and philosophical landmark in an old tradition of spires and domes that guarantees its relevance and authenticity. The sculptures, on the other hand, express a sense of mysterious depth and restlessness through anatomical displacement, or through the juxtaposition of shapes and spaces that are evocative of aspects of the psyche that unfold as one looks at them. They have to do with interaction, with male and female dependence and independence, with mute, mutual solidarity in the midst of loneliness, isolation and human helplessness, if not hopelessness. One feels a need for the affirmation of this solidarity, as in the drawings, and yet an ever present sense, or perhaps fear, of the encroaching unreality of its possibility. There is a personal, growing landscape here, not bleak but not too optimistic either, rooted in tentative exploratory hope as the drawings they are. The drawings from this point of view may present some kind of temporary answer, or at least a place of healing refuge from these tormenting questions, tormented problems. This exhibition is rewarding, comprehensive and accomplished. As if to emphasise both the contrast and the continuity with the past from which these drawings have emerged, there is also an architectural drawing and some pieces of sculpture which complete the exhibition. It is interesting to see them all blend into a homogeneous artistic and human statement. The perspective drawing, a design for a model project of Canberra Parliament House, symbolically expresses a political idea about democracy functioning as in a see-through temple, it is a precise conjugation of classical and romantic themes with strict, exacting requirements woven in. Parliament House is an architectural and philosophical landmark in an old tradition of spires and domes that guarantees its relevance and authenticity. The sculptures, on the other hand, express a sense of mysterious depth and restlessness through anatomical displacement, or through the juxtaposition of shapes and spaces that are evocative of aspects of the psyche that unfold as one looks at them. They have to do with interaction, with male and female dependence and independence, with mute, mutual solidarity in the midst of loneliness, isolation and human helplessness, if not hopelessness. One feels a need for the affirmation of this solidarity, as in the drawings, and yet an ever present sense, or perhaps fear, of the encroaching unreality of its possibility. There is a personal, growing landscape here, not bleak but not too optimistic either, rooted in tentative exploratory hope as the drawings they are. The drawings from this point of view may present some kind of temporary answer, or at least a place of healing refuge from these tormenting questions, tormented problems. This exhibition is rewarding, comprehensive and accomplished.
 
 

Paintings

Sculptures

Desmond O’Grady:
 
 

FEMSCAPE An Exhibition of Sculptures and Drawings by Giorgio Ceccarelli Torifalco Galleria d’Arte, Via del Vantaggio Roma, 7-22 October 1994

The sculpture of the Italian artist Giorgio Ceccarelli came to my attention when he was working for a while in the large Roman studio of his American sculptor friend Herzl Emmanuel at Via delle Mantellate in Trastevere. That was during the 1970’s. In such a large working area, surrounded by the many plaster casts and cast bronzes of the twenty years older Emmanuel – from giant standing figures to naturalistic portraits down to minimalist figurines – it would be impossible not to be influenced. All the more so since Emmanuel, when asked, would comment professionally on his friend’s and his own work. The practical and positive influence of Emmanuel’s friendship is obvious in Ceccarelli’s bronzes of those early years. However, Ceccarelli’s later bronzes are very much the personal statements of one who has worked his way through the directing influences of an older, more experienced teacher / adviser / commentator to personally more mature sculptural statements. As such they stand on their own merit.
For me, work of art, visual, aural or literary may have its origins in an epiphany moment of human experience. The artist’s record of that epiphany experience may bombolate out to national boundaries or even beyond to the internation and timeless. On the other hand a work of art may have its origins in an event of national, international or historic significance and find its expression in either epic art or, through implosion, in the readable, iconographicaly human and obvious. This has to do with matters of form and content. Form is idealistic. Content is human. An intermediate condition or representation may be called the iconographic – object as concept which in some cases we call abstract, even if it is figurative. Ceccarelli’s work in this exhibition is of the iconographic / abstract kind. His sculptures evoke both ideas and feelings simultaneously depending on how well the work is wrought by the viewer. Either way, epipanic or epic, the work of art begins on that limited space of the piece of bench, paper or musical scale. When finished it must fit proportionally in the space it was conceived for – a room, a book, and a theatre, open ground.
Ceccarelli’s sculptures exhibited here, many created in Emmanuel’s exceptionally large studio, contain their creator’s intended dimensions, have survived their place of origin and have found their natural space in this comparatively small gallery. For these reasons they impressed this viewer. They make a satisfying company in a small gallery.
The drawings that line the walls of the gallery have a life of their own. Female nudes, they may appear at times to border on the erotic. However, they have nothing to do with gender or with eroticism. What is eye-catching in them is their freedom of line, be it lyric or dramatic. Pure line can be sensuous. The human form is the most humanly moving of all form. How it is presented in an artist’s work is what’s most important, is vital and enlivening. That decides the degree to which the work achieves art. The constant practice of line drawing is as essential to any visual artist’s control and mastery of his craft as practising scales is to the composer, as description is to the writer. The selection of Ceccarelli’s is limited in number and confined in subject to the female form. From these drawings, however, the viewer gets a more personal glimpse of the artist. We read some pages from his notebooks, his personal journal as it were. This brings us closer to the questing and self-correcting artist at work revealing his trials and improvements detached from a committed involvement with and execution of an already clearly apprehended and projected single work as it is achieved through it’s laboured stages of realisation. These drawings are appetising refreshments for the viewer between more demanding inspections of the sculptures.
The whole exhibition is comfortably contained in a gallery properly proportioned for it. This was a satisfying presentation of work I could live with. Ceccarelli is now a very capable artist with promise of more mature work to come.