David Pèrez

"Naked tension"

Bonito Oliva recently suggested that the coexistence of sculpture, painting and drawing in a continuous surface, which does not require any external justification, contributes to sketching the syntax of an art that we can define as "transitional" through which the work it becomes a space of de-hierarchized and plural conjunction. In this way, observing the works of Vinicio Momoli we cannot help but perceive them as the charm contained in a frozen tension, of which the poles cancel the apparent game of dichotomy that they arouse internally.
Materials, intersections, colors and construction procedures give us a dialogue of contrast, tending towards an affirmative - and therefore imperative - answer like a serene, detached and contemplative question. The controlled informal gesture of the Italian artist is well reconciled with the precision of minimalist rigor understood as a discourse of deprivation and simplicity, the poverty and composition of the materials combines with the beauty of an accurate drawing, the two-dimensional plane of a seductive painting for the absence of color merges with the suggestive three-dimensionality of a material that dreams of its volume; the artisanal construction process harmonizes with the simulated industrial result.
As can easily be deduced, Momoli's work is placed in a space of unstable balances, in which the discussion of duality remains – to paraphrase Wittgenstein – dissolved rather than resolved. Through this dissolution we fall into a tranquil sphere that lacks ripples in which lies an anxiety that no longer has to manifest the frantic search for conjunction, present in all of our author's work. This anxiety to which we are referring causes the fact that combined with a writing of the order of reason - a dream of a modernity for which the words were however not the "Gospel" - the shadow of other writing coexists which takes its place of the one in crisis and its consequent overcoming.

In this sense, Momoli's works are paradigmatic in which a hidden presence is found in the black mortar used. They not only aspire to a contained three-dimensionality but basically to a confused observation: in the exaggerated void of silence a disturbing whisper throbs, a faint noise for which there is no possible comfort. These works, consequently, wander through a quiet territory full of hidden forces in which the contained rhetoricity that configures them supports different combinations of matter, which always remain unified in an integral and non-hierarchical way.
In Momoli's work we are not faced with an unequal overlap of discourses - a risk to which a certain hasty and perverse post modernism can lead us - but even better, before the desired verification of a restless "minimality" which subtly remains articulated. The relationship that is traced/drawn is felt in the palpable presence of naked tension. In it our gaze remains trapped by its perpetual transience. It is therefore futile to try to escape. We just have to give up to any way out – any comfort – and let ourselves be seduced.

David Pèrez - "Naked tension"
Exhibition catalogue, Gallery Gianni Giacobbi,
Palma de Mallorca (Spain) 1992