Ugo Casubolo Ferro

Ugo Casubolo Ferro appeared to me, from our very first meeting, like a character straight out of a Pasolini movie. But in truth, I had already seen, without knowing him, some of his works hanging on the walls of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. I had no difficulty superimposing the impression the person made on me with that produced by his early works: there was a kind of muted fervor there. We spoke at length about light, about phenomenology—perhaps it was the philosopher I had in front of me at that moment— while everything Valérie Jouve had told me about him came back to mind: his passion for printing, the assistance he had given her during her exhibition. I also learned that he was close to my friend, the photographer and printer Payram. In short, the strangeness emanating from Ugo Casubolo Ferro felt familiar to me.

Up to now, his most widely shown image is that large-format black-and-white portrait of a young woman, hair blown by the wind, leaning against a tree in a resigned posture. Around her neck, a childlike necklace whose letters spell out the word ‘bitch.’ This sense of silent tragedy asserts itself as self-evident. In the very material of the print, Ugo Casubolo Ferro turns metaphor into action. Other images of his come alive with figures who gradually form a wandering community, moving toward a fate one senses will leave marks.

Material is omnipresent in Ugo Casubolo Ferro’s work; he is known to be skilled in printing, perhaps a champion of analog processes, intoxicated by plunging his hands into silver salts and carbon pigments—but also, more recently, physically drawn, almost viscerally, to the art of imprinting on mineral surfaces. As though paper were no longer enough to tell the story; now it is the stones that speak. These ‘transfers on concrete’ will thus form the first bricks of the dwelling place of the people he has brought into being.

But what do they show us? They are heroes—I see Saint George slaying the dragon, like fragments of frescoes torn from a chapel once covered by the Primitives. And here is the Virgin… And suddenly those passages from the Decameron return to mind, when Pasolini, his forehead bound with a white ribbon, almost delirious, began playing the role of a student of Giotto.

Ugo Casubolo Ferro—he and his works—may give you, as they did me, the same impression of being in the presence of those who seek to pierce a mystery.

Michel Poivert, art critic & Professor of art history, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne