Open to the public from Friday 30 June until Wednesday 9 August 2023, in the spaces of the Basilica of San Celso in Milan, Mario Velocci Scultore, the first Milanese solo exhibition of the artist Mario Velocci (1949, Monte San Giovanni Campano, Frosinone). The exhibition is curated by the art critic Giorgio Verzotti and is set up by the architect Giuseppe Chigiotti.

The exhibition is organized by the Mastrantoni Foundation with the support of the Antica Tenuta Palombo and is organized in collaboration with the non-profit cultural association Isorropia Homegallery.

Mario Velocci Scultore presents a selection of works that document a part of Mario Velocci's prolific and varied artistic activity, which began in the early seventies and continues to this day. The selection of works set up in the space of the ancient basilica and in the garden focus on sculptures and bas-reliefs that Velocci created in steel.

Over the years, the artist has deliberately kept away from groups and trends to create singular sculptures: his poetics does not envisage the volumetric development of the three-dimensional work but, on the contrary, its reduction to essential load-bearing structures and elements such as rods vibrating, filiform, which resonate in the open space or at the touch of the observer. In the three-dimensional work as in the bas-reliefs, this sound factor does not assimilate Velocci's reductionism to a zero degree of expressiveness as in minimalist sculpture, but amplifies it by playing on the union between solidity of materials, mostly metals, with the immateriality of resonances which they produce.