[...] UMBERTO BASSO's works always allow you to catch the material they are made of, the sack reveals the weft, the paper its consistency, the wood its knots...; the vast chromatic range, - strictly connected with the concreteness of the support - associated with explosions of thick and black signs, with intense whirling lines or thin deep signs, describes an organic growth, where everything culminates in a continuous germination of flashes of light and dark corners which, within the warm full chromatic field, extend all perceptive possibilities. [...] MARIA VINELLA Art Critic - Bari [...] UMBERTO BASSO is "artifex" of imaginative writing mirroring anything that is movement, life outburst, passion, desire, dream, myth. He is inventor of a symbolic alphabet to which he entrusts the hope and the attempt to connect, in a Proustian sense, the fragments of existence, deposits of the memory, facts, experience in order to preserve them from the apaty, anxiety and doubts of today's world. He builds his artistic path on this interchanging relation between the internal and external. Having reached the depth of human anxietes he persues a new journey like a ferryman, from civilization to myth, from modernity to the silence of time, inside it and not towards it to capture its intimacy, stripping the unnecessary and direct himself towards the essential, the centre of depth. [...] ENRICA CAVALLO "Le Muse" Art Gallery - Andria (BA) [...] To have entered by mistake in the study of a scientist, a busy scientist to analyze in depth different types of fruit: this is the first impression that I had seeing the series "The Big Fruits" of UMBERTO BASSO. Have you ever tried to put any object under a microscope? The first result is that something will be totally new. Of that object you will see unexpected aspects. Above all, in a first moment, you won't recognize it. And it is exactly what happens in front of this series of artworks. The impact is very strong [...] but pass this phase we are led to curiosity, to the pleasure of discovering the hidden sides of something that we believed simple and absolutely know. UMBERTO BASSO gives us all these feelings without the need to resort to the antiseptic microscope, on the contrary exploiting the simple brush of the artist. Rather [...] the painter of Barletta adds to the analysis of the scientist, the imagination of the artist. ANTONIO TURI Journalist/Writer - Barletta