LUIGI MENEGHELLI

Exhibition catalogue, GalleryFontanella Borghese

Elementary structures without being monolithic entities, figures of order without being signs of tautology, forms of repetition (of modularity) without being declarations of absolute identity with themselves. Vinicio Momoli's works seek their open plastic constitution, in which the many skills of making converge: the sense of construction, the educational links, the quality of the materials, the executive intervention, it is as if "Minimalism" (to which the work of the Treviso artist has often been reported to have been lost every notion of impenetrability and abstraction, to assume that of a physicalism that crosses multiple disciplinary statutes (painting, sculpture, bas-relief, the object of unlikely use). Of course, the forms are invariably essential, they are shapes of extreme dimensional distillation, but for this very reason they cannot define or even suck in space (as minimal structures do).
On the contrary, they present themselves as an investigation of space, as a hypothesis for measuring the environment. The very fact of the iterated use of similar compositional patterns gives the idea of a discourse of expansion, of a continuous shifting of boundaries, of an incessant attack on the stability of the place. But everything in Momoli remains fundamentally at the circumstantial stage, everything is always under study: especially the various geometric figures, which seem to present themselves as a reflection on their own constitution, on their own taking shape.
This is how the materials used (iron, mortar, wire mesh, colour) exhibit their presence up to the extreme limit of the surface; this is how the image always seems to arise from the background, like a distance captured by the light; this is how even the pure pictorial story is highlighted in all its gestural scope, told in all its play of drafts... In the end we come to think of something always waiting to be clarified, of a work that does not know resolve between volume and surface, light and shadow, full and empty. Without a definitive solution, the work then takes on the faculty not of representing, but of existing within a concept of "processuality": it is a temporary place, even if it has ascetic connotations, it is a bumpy body even if it has high formal fidelity. Except that vertigo of space that literally surrounds it, also makes it regress to a stage of archè of sculpture: that is, the work becomes a theoretical fact, a thinking about one's own being and one's own living, a conceiving of figures that question themselves and the environment .

Thus, if a Donald Judd can affirm that the important thing is to "maintain the object in its totality", Momoli, from a distance, can affirm that what counts is the relationship of the parts, the composition, the interaction between the materials them, etc.: that, in the whole, what counts is every element that constitutes it, that orders it, that makes it exist. The final objective does not rest on the forms of reason, but rather on the opposite objective, that is, on the reasons of form, which demand every possibility of spatial risk, every freedom of structural alteration. To the point that, at times, Vinicio Momoli's work becomes a real greatness that breaks between the inside and the outside, between the self and the environment.
And this is a bit like what happens in installation-objects, where what is no longer at stake is only the metaphorical nature of the materials, their poetic reverberation, but also a reference to an idea of hypothetical functionality. These are elements which apparently have to do with design, with the planning of practicable objects, but which in reality are pushed to such a degree of complexity, of acrobatics, of paradox, that they are loaded with symbolic qualities once belonging to the myths and fairy tales.

It is a further way to broaden the threshold of perception, to open a new relationship with the world, to even redesign the very measures of living. For Momoli, perhaps Malevich's well-known aphorism can work: "the highest point of intelligence, the deepest, the vastest, the farthest is the break": it is the definitive form that crosses the limit of the indefinite, the rule that proceeds towards unruliness, the geometry that becomes a method for measuring dreams.

Luigi Meneghelli
Exhibition catalogue, Gallery Fontanella Borghese,
Rome 1994