Paolo Ceribelli is born on July 8, 1978. He starts his artistic journey with a series of works focusing on the stylization of common everyday gestures; he then experiments with oil – painting with his hands – and later he devotes himself to casting plaster. In 1998 the one-man show Ignoti collects his work.

In 1999 he cooperates with a group of writers and non-profit associations, and together they work on a photographic project on mural art in disused industrial areas. This experience brings him back to working on canvas using new materials, silicon and wall stucco among them. The results are three abstract projects Macchie di vita, Attirare lo sguardo, Solchi Materici in 2000. The abstract project Attirare lo sguardo, with its large use of spray acrylic colors and silicon is displayed in two exhibitions in Italy and abroad. In the 2003 Superm-Art project the attention on daily gestures, caught in their repetitiveness, is expressed in a mixed technique that uses collage of retail advertising materials and acrylic paint. The year 2006 is a creative turning point towards a new artistic research in the area of techniques and themes. Soldiers is born.

Soldiers draws together clashing written statements and easily recognizable plastic objects, which work as visual stimuli that go beyond the playful aspect of the object. Playing with toy soldiers, a favorite pastime of children from the most diverse social, cultural, and generational backgrounds, is very far from being innocuous, in this respect resembling most team games that to date are still part of juvenile and adult lives. There is no use denying that many of them are characterized by different measures of brutality.

Paolo magnifies tenfold and underscores these valences immersing the diminutive anthropomorphic sculptures in monochromatic baths and making them resurface as unwitting protagonists of his works, massing them, making them uniform, arranging them on the canvas so as to form maps and territories, flags and alignments, targets and playing fields. There is a bodily movement in the manipulation of the material and especially in the arrangement of the tiny soldier-figures on the canvas to which the artist accords great importance, because in this “doing” every structure takes on a meaning and every shaping of space incarnates variations of values. His works are plastic, three-dimensional, and they transcend the bounds of classical frontal appreciation to become tested and evaluated from more points of view.