CUFRINI

AN ARTIST with personality

by Rocco Zani

Cufrini, (multifaceted artist) recomposes the semblances entrusting the alphabet, universal language, the sign of identity, the form, shadow and lightning. And the gallery of faces and gazes is not just a summary of intentions rather an irreplaceable breviary - memory - of a common journey ... The interview retraces its recent and remote history; the beginnings, the becoming, the present time in one original narration capable of “laying bare” one of the most original and rigorous artists of contemporary art scene.

Umberto Cufrini, or more reasonably CUFRINI. I would take a trip back with you; starting with your last show which turned out to be a highly significant moment and which has met with enormous success with public and critics. Here, I would like you to tell us more specifically about this event.

It is an exhibition that comes from respect, esteem and I would say from the complicity that has been created with the inhabitants of an almost magical place, the village of Castro dei Volsci. This special relationship was born since I made the portrait dedicated to Nino Manfredi for the centenary of his birth. An extraordinary artist, actor, director, playwright, refined chanteur who crossed the cinematographic and theatrical history with great rigor and originality. Everyone had it for this job a really intense attention and gaze, perhaps underlining the historical character of these people: hospitality, generosity and great industriousness.

Thanks to this we are already working on new projects. In the people of this place I found the enthusiasm and the desire to grow, fundamental characteristics that I look for everywhere I go and that pushed me to create this dislocated exhibition using various spaces of this charming village. Exhibition that summarizes the last decade of my artistic research and which finds in the portraits of great personalities the pretext to evoke the great human and cultural heritage that we have inherited, thus avoiding leaving it die from myopia or superficiality.

Ajourney made up of great reflexive stops. I think about works dedicated to the great figures of cinema, music and culture in general. First of all to Nino Manfredi, to Marcello Matroianni, to Fabrizio de Andrè. Works that have found accommodation in the places of origin of these characters and that appear as iconographic images rehabilitated and revisited by your language expressive.

The portrait of Manfredi, like that of Marcello Mastroianni in Fontana Liri and of Fabrizio de Andrè in Genoa, have this as their goal: to revive in the people the pride of having had artists as fellow citizens of whom still today thanks to their talent, to their specific qualities, we are here to talk about them and to celebrate them for what they said and did. I would like this to trigger in us a process of healthy emulation and interest of those qualities and knowledge that we have inherited from them.

A path, this of the “portraits”, which seems to lead to a program of more full breath. You are working on a project that sees writers as protagonists Sicilians of the last century. What will happen?

Umberto Cufrini

Born in 1971. Graduated in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Frosinone. From 2007 he began to make the first portraits of great personalities. The “present / absent”, so called, from then on they appeared in the most unusual locations: in the X Factor talent show on the T-shirts worn by pop singer Morgan, or in public spaces, hair shops, restaurants and concept stores in Genoa, Milan, Florence, Barcelona, Naples, Treviso and Rome.

True! I proposed to create portraits of Fellini and Landolfi, Don Gallo in public spaces and St. Thomas, with the hope that they will be welcomed and realized because I believe firmly that art and culture stimulate people in emotional and intellectual growth. Soon I will also propose a series of portraits of writers of a land that has the right to redeem itself as it has always been considered, almost exclusively, for aspects that tend to denigrate and demean it. I’m talking about Sicily and at the same time Verga, Tomasi da Lampedusa, Camilleri, Quasimodo, Pirandello, Sciascia, writers that of this land are the illustrious spokesmen in the world thus rejecting the fatal association with the mafia, crime, abuses of power that everyone remembers with superficiality.

As you rightly pointed out, the recent Castro dei Volsci exhibition, although not being an anthology, it collects the meaning and the artistic substance of your progress in the last decade. How has your path evolved over this time frame?

The first portraits, which I called present / absent, are from 2011. I started making them with stencil for the possibility (that the technique offered) to reproduce an image several times and quickly. Although considered current because it is used by many street artists like Bansky, we find this technique already in use in Egyptian hieroglyphs or in the Chinese vase decorations for more than two millennia. One is led to believe that the use of this practice leads to the cold seriality of the image, but I disagree.

I have experimented with it on canvas, paper and cardboard, wood, iron, aluminum, plastic derivatives and I’ve always got completely different results. Already in 2011 I was using letters in plaster to make works (initially) without a precise storytelling. connotation. Then I carried out a series of “experiments” which I indicated as aphorisms and followed by geo-graphisms. When I started the series of “portraits” with stencils I thought of making some using these letters.

I called this technique “Wordwork”. The cycle began with a work dedicated to Morgan for which later I made over one hundred portrait images for t-shirts worn by the musician in numerous television speeches. Soon after I made a LONG SERIES OF PORTRAITS IN MY STUDIO WITH THIS TECHNIQUE: Dalì, Picasso, Frida, Einstein, Chaplin just to name a few and, in 2019, the first mural in a public space. The image iconographic of Fabrizio de Andrè took shape in the Luzzati gardens in Genoa.

In synthesis, this is the evolution, for sometimes different paths and directions. But at the origin of this work it has the same precise intent: to reach a vast and different audience with the aim of making these portraits “pop” and with them reaffirm the poetics and values that their art has produced. The meaning of all my exhibition projects also follows this will. I have often exhibited my works in places that can be defined as “not deputies to art “because I firmly believe that art must live everywhere, among people, in an elsewhere not always identifiable and reassuring. Create curiosity, stimulate stories and reflections. Asking questions, investigating, groped answers.

Back in time, our journey proceeds towards the prologue of your artistic existence but ideally marks the epilogue of our meeting. Your youth time, your training, your Masters.

The first of my teachers was my father. He had a construction mechanic company, a completely different branch from mine. Yet he taught me to face things with dedication and passion, to make work a “place” of research, of interest, sometimes of selfdenial. The Art School - which I attended at jung age - had as Director and teacher Adolfo Loreti, great painter and man of great values. From him I learned the philosophy and approach to the meaning of life. He has been for me a second father. During the years in the Academy I follow in to attend courses on Theory of Perception and Psychology of Form by Sergio Lombard, an enigmatic artist whose works from the 1960s I love in particular. With Patrizia Molinari - artist and professor of Art History - with whom I am still in contact,

I deepened my knowledge of the great protagonists and movements of the 1900s. I loved Duchamp and Dadaism, Giacometti, Moore, Brancusi, Harp, Picasso, Klein, Fontana. But who, most of all, influenced my research and my youth production was undoubtedly Alberto Burri. I visited the big exhibitions held in Europe in those years BUT I NEVER FELT SUCH A POIGNANT EMOTION BEFORE AS IN FRONT of Burri’s works in Città di Castello. I find the experimentation of the material that he followed consistently, brilliant first “bags” to the last “cellotex”. An extraordinary path with a coherent and precise formal rigor. At the end of our dialogue, it intrigues me to urge you on an aspect that in seems significant in your human and artistic existence.

You have always chosen to live in a small town, far from the metropolitan “routes” where market and communication rules are dictated. How much this position give you and how much does it take away from you... secluded?

I have had long experiences in Toronto, Barcelona and Naples, places that certainly offered me many stimuli and possibilities on an artistic level more than a small town like Frosinone, where I have a studio in the historic center. Yet in this territory I have always been supported by the mastery of great craftsmen, an aspect that I believe is of absolute importance. Let me explain better ... the great metropolitan “routes” have given me the opportunity to meet people of great depth; I had the chance to better disseminate, promote, exhibit and sell my work but at the same way they took away my concentration and skills in the creation phase. Therefore I think it is necessary first of all to do a good job (it doesn’t matter where) and later promote it elsewhere.