Umberto Mariani - The Hidden Form

During the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called poetics of the object began to spread in European and American art. Harking back to the readymades of Dadaist memory, a new wave of groups or movements emerged that repurposed everyday objects or discarded materials as works of art. The departure from traditional Dada lay in the strong influence of Abstract Expressionism, which led to the reconfiguration of objects with new languages ​​and new stimuli. In Umberto Mariani's artistic research, the central object is drapery, artfully created through a complex lead-working technique.

These four works are a beautiful example of artist Umberto Mariani's exploration of his famous "Piombi" cycle. In these works, Mariani creates draperies that take on a decidedly hyperrealistic and deliberately illusory quality, crystallized in their hard material. The draperies, therefore, are the central focus of the work, and this implies the coexistence of several very interesting conceptual themes. First and foremost, the very idea of ​​elevating the object to a work of art is typical of neo-Dadaist movements and our own Arte Povera, and consequently implies the concept of artistically recontextualizing the object through the artist's gesture, which in Mariani's case is defined as a repeated folding of the material. Through this process, the work becomes something entirely new, a sort of hybrid between painting and sculpture. Indeed, it is a monochrome painted canvas, but, at the same time, also a form sculpted by the artist with a complete three-dimensional presence in space. Indeed, the canvas almost seems to contain and conceal something within, taking on the appearance of a curtain drawn over an enigmatic and mysterious presence. Thus, Umberto Mariani's artistic production also possesses that hermetic and mysterious allure found, for example, in Christo's wrapped objects.

Umberto Mariani was born in Milan in 1936. He completed his art studies, first at the Liceo Artistico and then, from 1954 to 1958, at the Brera Academy in the same historic building, where he studied under Achille Funi, where he was hired as an assistant. In his most recent works, the "Piombi," the artist retains his favorite theme, drapery, providing a stylized and geometricized interpretation of this subject. No longer is it a lavish and redundant reference to Baroque folds, but more thoughtful forms suggest a more sedate and intimate interpretation of this theme, undoubtedly the most widespread and universally treated in the history of art. In the "Piombi," the drapery has lost all its realistic form; it has crystallized into straight lines that undoubtedly assert a more idealistic, more symbolic vision.

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