Ten years after the untimely death of the artist Ugo Marano, which took place in October
2011, the author resumes the ‘dialogue’ with the sculptor, ceramist and designer who
marked a significant page in Italian contemporary art. The attention focuses on two aspects
of his extensive creative experience, narrowing the narrative into a chronological
span and which, from the late Sixties, reach the very early Nineties. An analysis aimed at
clarifying the tones, the innovations that, dialectically, Marano, by the end of the Sixties,
did, challenging the Arte Povera, Conceptual, Minimalism movements and, then, challenging
the groups active in the vast Italian scenario of the 1980s, marked by that jungle of
individual experiences, of groups that will feed the postmodern condition, which sent a
new vision of art, of the market and of criticism, above all.
The artist’s experience, in those years, left no room for the uncertainty of identity or for
feverish hesitations of thought: all that happened at a precise moment of Italian and international
artistic culture, projected towards the triumph of appearance, of excess rush
to zero out any vitality or ferment that had plowed through the immediately preceding
decades. Marano, on the other hand, with his work which, on several occasions deliberately
touched utopia, affirmed the identity of an existential experience, charged with an
original, primary force: that of a new Prometheus.