ULISSE

Biography

Ulisse, named Rossano Massaccesi, was born at Osimo in the year 1957.Like the homeric personage, after haveing toured the world in the search of himself, in passage of the principal art center, he has returned to his “Itaca”, his actual Osimo.Here he lives and works to this day.
A self-made man since his youth in the world of contemporary pictorial art and sculpture, via study from grand maestros that he has taken inspiration from in “naif” art.
For several years he has participated at collective art exebitions and numerous personaly held exebitions.
Known and recognized by experts in this sector, by now he has entered in full merit/equal amongst the artist richiested by art galleries. Invited to many cultural functions, he has participated only to major expositions, national and international, where he has alwais gained noteworthy success.
The main theme of his paintings are landscapes and scenes of life, scenes of the past, between medieval and scenes of today with pungent irony.

Critics

Almost at the end of the century, among the manifold images representing pictorial art, figurative poetics still has an important space. In nowadays society, which is more and more oriented towards alienation, paranoia and dissociation of models and ideals, artists too, beyond their adhesion to different groups or currents, feel the need to recover values, which are able to fortify the spirit and the psyche of man, who seems to be inevitably destined to a definite collapse of his humanity. This figurative poetics, which has no time nor boundaries, which is objectively inspired, enchanted and free, rich of spectacular strains, pleasantly image-making and sometimes even maliciously allusive, pervades also a wide series of contemporary works realised by Ulisse within which Poetry certainly lives. These works are well known to experts and collectors for the quality of their narrative immediacy, but mostly for the recovery of a serene and blissful atmosphere typical of fairytales, for the convinced assertion of the traditional and maybe thoughtless way of life of the past. Therefore Ulisse is the amphitryon of an idyllic universe, pleasantly populated by the rather coquettish characters of the lively nuns, always busy, in Summer and in Winter, during the day and at night, in the farm- yard or in the courtyard, on the lawn or on a bridge over the brook; always intent on unusual activities, games and amusements (tug of war, fishing with the rod, randez- vous in the moon light…), which obviously distract them from fulfilling the daily liturgical practices. All this grants on a strong sense of camouflage of the artist; on a changing, but still fascinating, geometry of the antique architectural structures made of blocks of perfectly squared and smoothed stones, which embed to perfection; on the fluidity of the fundamental colours, which happily combine with the fairy atmosphere of the images; on a widely jocose narrative base; on an expressive lexis, which aims at reproducing the spirit of the places and the atmosphere of a world which is imaginary and unattainable, yet concretely pictured in this sort of visions, so rich of correspondence with our emotional and cultural sphere. We are therefore in the presence of a considerable and pleasant pictorial production in which the everyday prose illustrated in the paintings is already Poetry. There is no doubt, in fact, that these works, which develop in a culturally accredited mainstream of contemporary pictorial art (that of the antique village immersed in the majestic lawns with its squats made of stones; of the elegiac luminescent snowfalls….), by recalling an organic connexion between perception and imagination, in other words between physicity and idealism, of aesthetic and emotional potential, are able to arouse essential emotions which bring us back to an interior dimension precariously posed between past and present, dream and reality; maybe in the attempt of recreating for us in almost lyric terms a new post- romantic investigation of life.

(By Antonio Puglisi)