Mariano Navarro

Exhibition catalogue

Vinicio Momoli has been interested, since the beginning of his artistic work, in the fusion of materials, understood in their substantiality and in their evocations and functionality.
In his first pieces that I know of, from the early nineties, he mixed iron and wood, associated the painted or subtly drawn gesture with the industrially perforated metal plate and designed sculptures like furniture prepared for imaginary clients, chairs without backs, a solid sofa that does not know the disposition to rest. Omar Calabrese therefore situated his, in the line of the minimalist work of the narrators Raymond and Ian McEvan, of the rejection of the "neo-baroque taste which is summed up in an often ironic search for the complication of the formal and narrative models of art. The recourse to quotation, the return of the figurative, the pleasure for unstable and chaotic figures were all essential traits of that taste" Giulio Ciavoliello for his part, in a paradox that we will encounter again in reference to the artist, sees in his preferences a very different universe from that of the post-modern. "Momoli works with natural materials, because they have been used by man to build, to change the landscape. Materials, shapes, objects are considered, chosen, recalled for their anthropological meaning. They in themselves contain a ritual value, linked to aspects of work, rest and free time. The artist adds ritual to ritual, to the rites of life he adds, through dislocations and other creations, the rite of art".

In this period he also paid attention to the installations of the pieces, conceived mostly as wall pieces and, more rarely as floor pieces, with scales of expressive harmony. In the same way he could use the direct drawing on the wall as a means of underlining details architectural.
In the middle of the decade, his style becomes a little more rigorous in the choice of shapes that appear reduced to irregular modules, while he broadens his chromatic options with the inclusion of red and indigo, black and the color of wood. . Meanwhile, he keeps intact his predisposition to dialectically compare figures and materials. Immediately afterwards and until the end of the 1990s, his work underwent important changes. At first the figures adapt in an orthodox way to the minimalist language, both for their regular shapes with predominance of the square, the rectangle and rhomboidal models, as well as for the monochromatic solution of the colors, which multiply, here, their variants: a black forerunner, milky whites, striking yellows, pastel greens, marine and nocturnal blues, etc. This chromatic proliferation and the progressive tendency towards bright, flaming colors will characterize, as we will see, his work in recent years.

Its arrangement in space remains faithful to the contrasts and dialogues on the wall, without losing the harmonious brushstrokes we have described.
Now accentuate its solid character, creating parallelepipeds that you place against the wall or on the ground.
Organizations and formulas then appear, particularly in the floor pieces, such as "floor without title", from 1997, in which I believe we see certain references, more delicate than ironic, to the fathers of minimalism, here to Carl Andre.
The material of the work is rubber, as usual in his work. Compact black rubber, which Momoli cuts and works until giving it distinct surface textures that absorb light unequally and, so to speak, giving it different consistencies.

But it is the addition of a new element that transforms his works: it incorporates light. Electric light, from bulbs with a generally spherical shape, a new figure so far absent from his catalog of shapes which causes substantial changes and alterations from reflected color in our perception.
The installation also varies, because the unprecedented presence of the cables, which aggregate a new "design" extending between the wall work and the ground, generates a new space that extends resplendently, crossed by brilliant points and transparencies.
To define it in a legible way, I would say that his work has become atmospheric, a kind of aura that envelops the viewer's eye, which can be linked to solid objects, as if floating, indifferent and free, in an ether made of light expanded.
From the combination and mixture of some of these lines arise, it seems to me, the essential components of the works that make up the exhibition we are presenting, and which the author has called "words in the wind".

They are the transparency of the formal possibilities of choice, as a double reference that is claimed to a certain Italian modular tradition to, let's say, dismantle it and, lastly, a mode of installation that without abandoning its formal power becomes scenography.
Large sheets of methacrylate, behind which we can read the characteristics of the surface on which they are placed, on which the artist has traced an intricate concatenation of lines that seem like impossible city plans or, perhaps better, traffic routes, passable colors, sometimes like filled surfaces that sow fields or rest areas (perhaps more of my idea than a return of Momoli to its origins). Colors whose range we talked about a little while ago, but intensified in brightness by the conditions of the support, so much so as to constitute a second figure made of radiant shadows. Curiously, the scenography of his installations now takes place in separate pieces. Thus, in "The space delayed" of 2002, in which, in front of the methacrylate placed on the ground, he placed dozens of glasses which he illuminates with a powerful white fire, which makes them jump as they reflect and shine against the drawn surface. In "untitled", from the same year, the spectators are real figures of men and children, all with one trait in common: they carry suitcases and represent greeting signs while contemplating (so it seems to us) a plan for a possible virtual journey.
A different and heterogeneous proposal that perfectly fits the title that Momoli gave to an exhibition held in 2000 in Bologna: "Semplice/complex".

Mariano Navarro
Exhibition catalogue,
National Photography Center,
Torrelavega, Cantabria (Spain) 2002