Giorgio Ruggeri

"Messages of love"

Vinicio is a boy, who has grown over the years. He still feels behind him that sweet twilight that he has just passed through. the lost paradise of childhood. Smells, flavours, trees, apple pies and puffed rice, boat trips, fishing in the river, staying late at night in the woods... nothing is enough to find you, my childhood. Only by rummaging through your silent ruins does the artist find in his memory the lasting truths that he is configuring in his paintings. He knows that his early youth slips away with the speed of sand gripped in a fist.

No one is saved except artists and poets, for whom Brancusi's warning applies: if we lose the child within us, we are dead. Vinicio made it a flag and the climate that can be felt in all his pictorial work confirms this assumption. But there's more. The painter is convinced that in a work of art what matters is the purity of the invention, the integrity of the vision, just as he thinks that the purpose of a painting is always to make people happy, even if his painting is born from no small ordeal. It seems like a game, but it's not. That simple meeting of lines, shapes and colors - all spent very sparingly - actually betrays a slow unraveling of tensions which, by dint of digging, reach a stripped essentiality. Starting from a somewhat naturalistic painting, Vinicio arrived, by dint of digging, at that enchanting elementary figuration that can be admired in his paintings today. A painting reduced to the bare bones, it is true, where however the central vein of invention flows freely and transparently.
In one of his first paintings, Paradise Lost, a child can be seen walking dreamily among the flowers clutching a bouquet in his hands. From this painting, although beautiful and nourished by a highly emotional substratum, the painter began to filter a new language. poorer in appearance but intense with underlying contents, absolutely devoid of waste, burned by an imagination that leaves no room for the superfluous.

From such a resolute reduction Vinicio discovers the value of graffiti, of the first bare landscapes seen from a bird's eye, in a slow and silent glide between mountains, villages, farmhouses, trees, roads, rivers, with a painting made of earth, where the very low tone of the colours, treated with a veil, does not alter the nature of the material. From Klee he learned the art of "mining" and the secret tension that the Swiss master knew how to draw from the combination of elementary forms; from Music, the refined painter from Gorizia, the lesson of the sublime lyricism of colors on a poor and unadorned material.

One of the fundamental data of Vinicio Momoli's pictorial work is stylistic coherence, the result of an exemplary discipline aimed at escaping entirely from any form of rhetoric to achieve, through the composition of simple forms, a particular harmony of its own. In the silence of the spaces that overlook its landscapes, together with lcaro and his brothers, a sort of fairytale climate hovers, and, as in fairy tales, there is no room for the precarious, for the momentary, for the particular: everything aims for essentiality. The tale that Vinicio never tires of telling, nor us of listening, unfolds subtly in the sign of memory relived in the depths of the heart.

Giorgio Ruggeri - "Messages of love"
Exhibition catalogue, "Il volo di Icaro"
Meeting Gallery, Mestre (Venice) 1987