Luigi Consonni

More than twenty works by the artist Fabio Massimo Ulivieri are exhibited in the small church of the parish of Macherio. A series of works unusual compared to what we usually expect to see when faced with more or less realistic representations of subjects linked to spirituality, the mystery of the Universe, Man and God.

“The Resurrections” that Fabio Massimo Ulivieri, co-founder of the artistic group Symbolicum, proposes to us are part of a structural and expressive research he began in 1996, where reality is expressed in a figurative symbolic abstraction devoid of superfluous elements and reduced to the smallest elements: the “fragment-as-totality”, “fragment of the non-finite” which symbolically restructures the virtual totality of the vision of reality.

We are faced with an expressiveness that does not describe reality figuratively; rather, through signs, fragments of reality, it proposes its vision: a sort of micro-imprint that evokes a latent image in memory, and that leads us back to the “principle”. Therefore, not a description of a subject to be reproduced, but, on the contrary, its emotional interpretation, through the depiction of fragments of that subject, which leads us to immerse ourselves in memory and recreate a virtual vision of what the author proposes. So a “resurrection”.

In the Resurrection of the Cathedral, we find the maximum expression of his way of symbolically representing the visible: the image is suggested by an essential sign where the gestural and material white fragment, on the white background of the canvas, with the gold stain symbolising the Madonna, becomes an all-encompassing vision of the Cathedral. The white of the canvas, the structural colour of the work, the ascetic drapes of the metaphysical white of the Cathedral and the gold of the Madonnina, “resurrect” that religious feeling towards the transcendent that has always characterised the industrious spirituality of the charitable Lombard human soul.

Just as on the façade of the Ca’ Granda, the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, now the University of Milan, with its Renaissance perspectives, the fragments of the rose windows, the small columns that support the arches, thanks to a perfect coexistence, fusion, between the structure and the symbol “resurrects” the memory of a centuries-old structure that was the historic Lombard place for the treatment of suffering.

In his interpretation of Leonardo’s Last Supper, Ulivieri’s iconography is summarised in a few figurative elements: Leonardo’s Christ, Judas revisited as a red silhouette in an image-symbol of betrayal and shed blood, the Apostles as barely hinted silhouettes, ancillary partners in the drama, and the gold-coloured background, a symbol of royalty and sanctity. All give the work an intense spirituality.

In the round paintings, Ulivieri’s “religious” poetry symbolises the tragedy of the Crucifixion. The head and hollowed-out face of Nazzarenus, the crown of thorns on his forehead, and a throbbing drop of blood are symbols of the martyrdom of an innocent man. A symphony of tonal, calibrated lights makes the vision of the crucified Christ dramatic and suggests the imminent resurrection.

And last but not least, at the end of the conceptual path of this exhibition, the Castle, the Lombard symbol of man’s power over man that conditions his life and death, a place that coagulates the peaks and abysses that characterise the single human story, transfigured by Ulivieri into a metonymic epiphany: the “fragment-of-the-unfinished” as all-encompassing reality, “symbolism-in-becoming” in the iconological virtuality of space.