Change is hard at the beginning,
messy in the middle
and glorious at the end.
Robin Sharma

I would like to follow a hunch and launch a column devoted to those artists who, in my very humble opinion, though they have long worked within the Umbrian context, nonetheless part ways with it in some measure.
I have now spent twenty years working as an art historian and curator in the Umbrian context. I have also taught for some time at the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, and I know most of the artists active in our region well enough to sense connections, affiliations, lineages and cross-pollinations.
Immersion in the local reality has, of course, often led me to wonder what this land “of saints and wolves”, of hermitages and green landscapes, of borders drawn on land – with no sea view – deposits in the mind and heart of the “Umbrian artist”, whether by birth or by choice. Although the attempt to reduce the artistic question to a regional logic is certainly rather specious, this reflection strikes me as quite pertinent within the pages of the journal “Studi Umbri”. Let me therefore set out briefly a few personal considerations on local contemporary art, forcing my hand a little to emphasise the areas of differentiation potentially at play among the various practitioners.

An [(in)exact] portrait of the Umbrian artist
Thinking in the abstract of contemporary “Umbrian” artists, or of a never-formalised “Umbrian school”, I find myself listing, as a widespread and shared trait, a great complexity of execution. A complexity born, at times, of formal refinement; at others, of sophisticated intellectual scaffolding.
Formal precision – sometimes disguised, but in truth almost always present – is often paired with the pursuit of timeless, absolute formulas, ones better able to speak of universals and metahistorical archetypes than of the tensions of the present.
On an anthropological level – and I include myself entirely in this bracket, as a true dyed-in-the-wool Umbrian – the Umbrian artist and thinker, whether out of necessity (given the morphology of the land) or by choice (because at a certain point the light of the sunsets turns you mystical), is often solitary, inward-looking, little given to the research group or to sharing.
And only very rarely does the work take on irony, still less self-irony.

Reversals
So here it is: I have decided to catch you off guard and devote this column to those who, though Umbrian by birth or by adoption, are strangers at home and – whether integrated or isolated – produce a body of work that cannot be described in full along the lines set out above.
Why? Because the journal “Studi Umbri” already offers, from its very cover onward, a wealth of fine contributions on Umbrian artists, and I – for all that I love and support them in my work – would take pleasure in offering a different point of view. A kind of beneficial virus, one that stirs the antibodies of our artistic system and opens it up to reflection on the manifold artistic potentials currently present in Umbria.