Marano Red

Marano Red
 
Ugo Marano in his Museo-vivo
edited by Gabriella Taddeo

Cycle of Dishes and Tiles
WABI Collection – Emotional Gardens
Vernissage: Wednesday, May 20, 2026 6 p.m.

 
 
Cristina Tafuri
For Ugo Marano. Of earth and fire
Ugo Marano in his life has always been in contact with the four elements. He wanted to be in symbiosis with nature, to blend in as a tree or become a rustle of the wind. The sea represented amniotic fluid for Ugo Marano, it was birth and rebirth always, each time different like the waves of the sea that are never the same.
The sea, the’limitless sea as Walt Whitman wrote, is the siren song that envelops our senses in the desire to belong totally to it. Marano often loved to go barefoot to feel the energy of the earth, to be part of it, root, stem, leaves, this is his relationship with ceramics to which he gave art value, to his totemic vases that seemed to defy the law of gravity because of their extreme height.
In this symbiotic relationship with nature, Eros becomes the natural element, a primal, cosmic force, according to philosophical doctrine, a principle that tends toward beauty, an ancient principle concerning drive and sensuality.
The clay is soft, warm, the pot becomes uterus, vagina, deep cavity that holds the man, his sex. In ancient times, peasants scattered their seed in the earth to propitiate a bountiful harvest, the phallus was totem, it was magic, it was life in the earth that warmly welcomed it. Imagine apotropaically the long, large phalluses of Roman’eros, especially visible in the Pompeian Domus. In these works by Ugo Marano on display at the Creative City Museum in Ogliara, the exuberance of these figures with disproportionate phalluses emerges from the bright red of the color covering the tiles and plates, as if to show of a desire that towers overbearingly with its fiery iron scepter. And as Picasso reminds us between art and eroticism there is no difference.

Filomena Director
Creative City Museum
The Creative City Museum, in its new guise of full accessibility thanks to the recent implementation of the project “Removal of Physical and Cognitive Barriers” financed under the PNRR, reopens its doors to the exhibition activity that will complement the workshop activity already in place.
And it is precisely a small retrospective on the creator and first artistic director of this museum reality, which will be grafted onto the motherland of clay that has always been marked by the production and processing of terracotta, that kicks off this new beginning. A ceramic identity that the museum has always sought to maintain and also to encourage.
Ugo Marano was an excellent master in this atavistic art that he called not minor art but queen art, the mother of all arts that emerges from all archaeological sites and allows us to reconstruct the life of the people of the past and their ways of living.
This artist also managed to synthesize in his works multiple creative souls extending from drawing to ceramics to sculpture.
I take this opportunity to reiterate the objectives of Creative City aimed first of all at preserving and enhancing the identity of the place but also at giving visibility and strength to all the artistic and craft ferments of depth given that the level of civilization of an area is also and above all measured by the cultural richness it manages to mature and the artistic quality that enhances it.
I would like to thank those who made this exhibition possible by making available the exhibition material that will allow users to get to know a significant fragment of Marano’s vast production that continues to tell us about him and his great ideational and creative vein.

Gabriella Taddeo
Exhibition Curator
The potter from Cetara returns to speak to us in the rooms of the Creative City Museum in Ogliara that was one of his creatures. The sequence of works on display chases Eros as sacred transgression and pure energy that seeks ecstasy. It is the mind speaking to the body and approaching it in its psychological and seductive play to awaken it beyond the limits of the superego and to experience the fullness of existence. We are told this by these stylized beings with elongated and imaginary bodies without identities that come to life in his plates and on the area of his tiles. The same erotic allusiveness is also in the depiction of the bird towering over his Happy Fountain.
Red arrives as an echo from the house of the Vetti and other Pompeian houses reaching him, who reinterprets it as selenium red and makes it absolutely contemporary, pushing the boundaries of language and inner experience. The color of red has always been already and since the archaic times of the Greeks first and the Romans later, the archetype of fire as creativity, as art in particular ceramics but also as the flame of passion, burning heat that belongs to ‘eros.
In his strokes we seem to hear the fragrant echo of the canticle of canticles that hymns to the two beloved ones on a bed of flowers and celebrates sexuality as a divine gift in the encounter between two merging beings.
Ugo Marano had many faces; he was pure artist in his completeness: designer, potter, sculptor, performer. They called him “visionary talent”.
In the 1970s he was invited to exhibit at the Quadriennale in Rome, the Venice Biennale and the Milan Triennale, and in 1982 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 1991 he was the leader of the group of “Vasai di Cetara” in his homeland. In Salerno in 1996 he designed and built the Felice Fountain.
Ugo Marano died in 2011, and his production of works of art is currently preserved not only in “Casa Marano” in Capriglia but also in many museum spaces and in private places of collectors who over time have passionately believed in him. His poetics is outlined as an innovative vision that combines art, nature and civilization.
His approach is not only aesthetic, but ethical, aiming at the preservation of the’environment and the enhancement of craftsmanship. The artist often polemicized against the lack of civic sense, and for him, elegance lies not in fashion, but in respect for nature, landscape and community. During the experience of the “Vasai di Cetara” (a group created in 1991), Marano promoted creative work free from dogmatic and academic schemes, giving ceramics the dignity of contemporary art. His designs he called them “environmental thoughts” or messages related to landscape context and material. His poetics has also been called “room of the’utopia” where it is mental dwelling and space of free creation.
“The frogs will croak again” the artist hoped in the manifesto regarding the economic utopia that he matured together with economist Pasquale Persico and that was supposed to revive the’entire hillside area of Rufoli. And it was there that the Creative City Museum was born, in 1997 a space-laboratory of ceramics, for him the mother of all arts, a disowned queen art. Marano believed in a living museum, necessary in a land that has always been marked by the working of clay, dotted with kilns and artisans as he himself reminds us in the text of his Manifesto: “In Rufoli di Salerno there is a village where there is a lot of good clay that transformed into terracotta takes on two enviable characteristics the incarnate color of a child and the sweet and timbral sound of a bell. In this village there are many kilns that in the past provided work for local people and supplied tiles to the ceramists of Vietri Sul Mare who decorated them gracefully to adorn churches and houses”.