Ugo Attardi - The Man and the Dawn

The iconography of this work certainly has allegorical meanings and can be defined, in some ways, as symbolist precisely because of its allusion to underlying meanings. It is a type of subject that can be traced back to the artistic language of late nineteenth-century painters such as Moreau, Böcklin, and Puvis des Chavannes, who, despite using a substantially figurative language, developed intellectually complex iconographies, full of symbolic and allegorical references.

In this sculpture, Ugo Attardi creates a figure of tremendous expressive power, simultaneously concrete and transcendental. The subject's powerful anatomy is reflected in an ostentatious stillness and a formal synthesis that enhances the plastic qualities (there is a certain resemblance to William Blake's figures). The composition is in tune with a perfect spirit of unified harmony. The figure interacts perfectly with the space created by the globe, a precise reference to Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.

Ugo Attardi is one of the artists who has shaped Italian art for over 50 years. He was born in 1923 in Sori. For him, a "true artist" is the demiurge who has the power to transform an object into a subject of wonder and amazement, revealing the essence of being. The truth that Attardi wants to draw from his works is the revelation of their secret beauty at the moment in which their being takes shape. At just over 20 years old, he was among the signatories of the Forma 1 manifesto, along the lines of geometric abstraction, traces of which remain in the chromatic decomposition of the Sicilian landscapes painted during his travels on the island. At the beginning of the 1950s, he devoted himself to a painting with a realist approach and a civic commitment, which was followed by a further shift in his language towards themes of interior scenes intertwined with outdoor urban views. After his experience as editor of the magazine Città aperta (1957), eroticism and violence appear in his works. From 1967, he devoted himself to sculpture and narrative and developed his graphic and drawing activity, in which the plasticity of chiaroscuro contrasts alternates with the reduction of the sign into elementary and essential forms.

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