Feature: Passion, study are at roots of masterpieces: Italian artist

Italian artist Umberto Mariani lives and works in a loft on two levels in a former factory in Milan.

"This was my first artwork," he said pointing at a slim wine bottle that he designed when he was a student many years ago.

Mariani, who will turn 80 at the end of this year, is best known for his multidimensional folds of fabric carved out of lead sheets, where the folds both seem to conceal a mysterious object beneath, while also evoking its presence.

During the 1960s Mariani picked up his first projects doing monumental narrative work for the St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City as well as mosaics and frescos, but the classical Greek statues that he grew up observing on the streets of Italy had the most profound influences on his work.

"In 1974 I started to make paintings where the fold and drapery were the absolute protagonists," he told Xinhua in a recent exclusive interview. "If you thumb through an art history book, you will see that drapery takes 80 percent of the painted or sculptured surfaces. There is a sculpture of Emperor Augustus of Rome, for example, completely enveloped in a drapery to represent his demigod nature," he elaborated.

Mariani has traveled around the planet. Ethiopia, Norway, Pakistan and Mali are some of the countries that he has visited and whose pictures are hung on his home's walls along with some of his artworks.

His travels and knowledge of the world have made Mariani so approachable despite his notoriety, noted Fabio Ciaravino, his assistant. "His works give me gooseflesh when they are finished and I look at them, but at the same time I know they are the fruit of deep research. They are the result of a life full of curiosity, of each day spent in discovering new things," Ciaravino told Xinhua.

"I used to create paintings. Then it happened by chance that I started to make some tiny sculptures with small pieces of lead," Mariani said. By the 1990s he gave up painting, and up to now in his laboratory new ideas, shapes and colors come out incessantly from lead.

Mariani has had several gallery and museum exhibitions in many cities of the world, such as Paris, New York, Dubai and Seoul, and many of his works have been sold at auction. His ongoing exhibition in Florence includes also a selection of fashion designer Roberto Capucci's sculpture-dresses, whose processing techniques recall the geometric shapes of Mariani's artworks.

Mariani said he developed an attraction for the "universal" value of drapery as art is universal too. He underlined, however, that true artworks require study besides passion.

"How much interest do you have in visiting a museum or an exhibition, how curious are you about understanding how the artworks were made? These are the questions that anyone who wants to become an artist should pose himself as the starting point," Mariani observed. "And then you need to work hard," he added.

Mariani had a regular course of study. "Since I was a child I enjoyed painting with watercolors, and after I won two design contests, my teachers recommended that I attend arts school," he said. So he first studied at an arts high school and then graduated from the Brera Academy in Milan.

"When I told my father that I wanted to become an artist, he just asked me: "have you reflected carefully?" he recalled.

The advice that Mariani likes to give young artists is not to wait around for inspiration, as all the best ideas come out of the work itself. "This is how things went for all the great artists of the past, whose masterpieces such as The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, just to make an example, were often made on commission and resulted from deep commitment," he said.

And commitment is exactly where the "enigma" that in his view is always contained in artworks comes from. "There must be a sort of labyrinth in artworks, where the glaze goes lost," he believes. "There are some artworks where this sort of mystery is very strong: they are the absolute masterpieces," he said. Enditem