The BOOK
Based on the book:
Self-taught. There is a sort of disdain in underlining it, a desire to specify that the production of ink drawings and paintings by Umberto Rossi is not structured between the coordinates of academic courses but is born fresh and spontaneous in the technique as in the contents, inspired by the attachment of a man to their land, to their place of origin: Montecerboli and the surrounding countryside, where the contrast between the landscape characterized by the refrigeration towers and the fumes of industry and the timeless one of the farmhouses, the ancient buildings, the silent churches shaded by bushes and cypresses, are the protagonists of a work that constitutes a sort of iconic song dedicated to the native place.
Umberto begins, in his early twenties, to draw plants and elements natural using mainly the indian ink, solicited to the expression by a country parish priest, Don Candido Molesti, who had in care of the church of San Ippolito, near Montecerboli. Friendship with the priest and his encouragement mark the beginning of a journey that Umberto has been carrying out over the years, refining his skills and experimenting with new techniques. In the early 1950s the teacher of the School of Art of Volterra Bruno Lessi is struck by the works and by talent of the young man, so as to push him to improve by introducing him to fascinating techniques of watercolor and oil paints.
In Montecerboli, in Borgo, in the ancient part of the small town, Umberto, to cultivate this passion of his, sets up a laboratory where for a certain period, together with his works, he keeps a cloth in poor condition depicting a Madonna from the castle church. It was the parish priest Don Tasselli a hand it over to him during the renovation of the religious building. The presence of the cloth in his room is seen by Umberto as a real e its presence, a blessing and in any case it represents, beyond the Christian meaning, a link with the past of the entire local community.
The years pass and the jobs become more and more numerous. If the techniques privileged are the ink drawing, the watercolor, the oil colors and finally the paint, with its reflections of light, the painter makes use of different supports, so he paints on various types of paper, cardboard but also on wood, plywood, on walls, on iron and also on the bodywork of his 500, one of the which, completely painted, which depicts the village surrounded by the green countryside dominated by a clear and clean sky, is located in the square of the Borgo
Time stops in Umberto's hills, in the lights and shadows on the bark of the trees and on the exposed walls of the country houses, with their simple and solid structures. A time that is not marked in years but in days, hours, as if to say that every moment is a precious unrepeatable moment of life, so even the sentences written under the drawing or in a corner of the sheet, half hidden by the pictorial elements become work and they blend into the image, giving it, even when they seem not to connect directly with it, an even more evident humanity.
A small album contains a series of watercolors depicting Montecerboli. The sepia-colored collection constitutes a precious historical-visual documentation of the castle and the streets adjacent to it. The images, devoid of visionary suggestions, are realistic representations of places where human presence seems unnecessary. It is the walls, the windows, the doors that here speak of a simple life, with a slow rhythm. Everything is enveloped in an almost golden light that the monochrome suffuses and fills with melancholy poetry. There is like the desire to stop time, for a moment, to hold back, to preserve, pictorially recreating, without however falling into the coldness of detailed photographic realism, the familiar places of life. In the small block that collects the watercolors, Umberto has inserted short texts, on the back page, in which historical facts related to the country, traditions and festivals are remembered. The characters, the color of the ink and the initials decorated in a medieval way harmonize well with the images and form a unicum, a work that arises from the encounter between written and visual testimony.
The works in oil and tempera, which are more varied in relation to the format, present a series of landscapes and village views. Recurring the tree motif which, like man, has roots that bind him to the land where he is born and grows and that here seems to become a silent witness to the continuous and regular the changing of the seasons, of the unstoppable passage of time. Element of a natural architecture that is a symbol of life, attachment to the earth, momentum towards the sky, the tree becomes subject and protagonist of some of the painter's works.
