Ugo Giletta
Ugo Giletta (born 1957 in San Firmino di Revello) is an Italian artist. Career. Giletta's exhibition activity began in the early 1980s with solo exhibitions such as "Cavassa '87" (1987, Civic Museum of Casa Cavassa, Saluzzo) and "Il colore della forma" (1989, Quadreria d’arte, Cuneo). Starting from the 1990s, Giletta appeared at institutional exhibitions in various locations in Piedmont and beyond: Tempo d’arte (1991, Torino Esposizioni, Turin), Intermedia (1992, Crawford Gallery of Cork, Ireland), Fantastica automazione (1993, Fondazione Marazza, Borgomanero), Proposte IX (1993, Palazzo IRV, Piedmont Region, Turin), Traiettorie sonore (1995, Villa Olmo, Como), From 200 to  2000 (1995, Palazzo Dugentesco, Vercelli). In 1999, with the writer Nico Orengo, he produced the multimedia show The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy, freely adapted from the book of the same name by Tim Burton, presented at the Doge’s Palace ([Ducale]) in Genoa; his collaboration with poets and writers also includes the creation of some art books for Edizioni Pulcinoelefante, especially with Orengo and the poet Alda Merini. Since 2000, Giletta has exhibited his works nationally and internationally in art galleries, institutions and museums in Italy, France, Belgium, Hungary, Austria, Germany, South Korea, China, and Singapore. In 2003, he  was a finalist at the Mastroianni International Award. He took part in other exhibitions, among which, in 2016, the Challenging Beauty Insights of Italian Contemporary Art at the Parkview Green Museum, Beijing, an exhibition illustrating the contemporary scene of Italian art from the 1960s to the present day, from Poor Art to Transavantgarde, from the New Roman School to the generations of artists of the Nineties and Zero’s. MOVING TALES Racconti in movimento (Cuneo Civic Museum), an international selection of 30 video works from La Gaia Collection of Cuneo. Artistic activity. Ugo Giletta's artistic career has been characterized  by the use of various techniques including painting, drawing, sculpture and video installations. As Francesco Poli writes: "All his work, although diversified, merges into a poetic underlying restlessness that deals with the enigma of existence.” The painting is realized with watercolor on paper and canvas of various sizes, while all the drawings are created in pastel. Ugo Giletta works almost exclusively with the human face, as Guido Curto noted, "... facial features lack a precise connotation, they are portraits that do not depict anyone, but represent only the fluid identity of our Western mass globalized society." Lea Mattarella describes these works  as figures that outline lonely and isolated heads and faces in an indefinite emptiness that cannot be easily contextualized. Historian and art critic sums it up: "These are figurations that are simply present, in their objectivity, without the need for explanations as to whom they belong or where they come from. The fascinating journey exactly means delving into their uniqueness" When Giletta uses the video in his installations, as well as in his sculptures, the figures are considered by critics as sad beings, painfully lost, forgotten, ruined. Giovanni Tesio writes in this regard: "... imprisoned inside a wholly inner language , they come from the emptiness and aspire to a shared silence." To emphasize the poetics of the artist’s entire work, Lóránd Hegyi adds: "... for this reason we can’t look at them without compassion, without empathy, since, in their essence, the slow process of disappearance, the unstoppable process of loss, acquires a poetically powerful form."