FLASH ART, NO. 222 JUNE-JULY 2000
Born in 1956 in Milan, where he is living and working, Fabio Massimo Ulivieri bears in himself – I would say – the “blood archetypes” of the town of Manzoni, Carlo Porta and the futurist Marinetti. They throb inside his emotionality as palpitating “symbols of Milanesity”, of this European metropolis of culture and art.
The “Resurrections” of “Milan Mythography” (started in 1996) are their umbilical cord, they are the images of “The Cathedral”, of “The Ca’ Granda” and “The Sforzesco Castle”. We know that the myth epiphany has represented in past times and through different interpretations a truth-in-becoming bound to irrational knowledge. What is the structure of mythical thought? According to Cassirer, the essential feature in the myth is that there is no distinction between the symbol and the object. Jung considers this as the expression of the collective unconscious which precedes the individual unconscious.
Being an artist keen to the essential, in his avant-garde figure problems (an original structural and semantic research synthetized in a symbolic figure), Ulivieri covers with symbols, magic and mystery his Milanese myths through his “Resurrections”; they are visions that melt past and present in his recollection because the reality of space-and-time is always – inside ourselves – a verification of memory, a dimension of our living. From the imposing white religious symbol of “The Cathedral” (on top the golden emblematic spot symbolizing the Madonna) up to the front of “The Ca’ Granda” (fragments of rose-windows, column, arch, nostalgic windows) or to the ochre vibration of the bricks, to the Renaissance fortress of “The Sforzesco Castle”) Ulivieri (co-founder of the Milanese Symbolicum Group) does not describe reality: he reduces it to its identifying elements. His visual identifying elements represent a symbiosis between structure and symbol: the fragment of the unfinished as total reality (as I wrote for Flash Art, February-March 1997).
It is a vision that I called “presence of the absence”, as virtual iconology in its “continuum”. The pulsation of the pigments (acrylic, mixed technique on canvas, paper) expand from a visceral materiality to delicate, wisp-like, shadowy brush-strokes. Everything is wrapped by Mistery. The phenomenal reality appears like a metamorphic labyrinth., a “work-in-progress of Mistery”. What is the origin and meaning of the Universe? He is a master of his “Resurrections”, “viajero de los suenos” in his artist’s feelings. Ulivieri keeps visiting that endless labyrinth of reality with the symbols of the unconscious.