Omar Calabrese

Exhibition catalogue, UNESCO Palace

It is fashionable in recent years to talk about ''minimalism''. Not in the sense of the so-called ''minimal art'' of the 1960s and '70s, but in the more recent one developed in American literature, with authors such as Carver or McEwan. ''Minimalism'', thus, is no longer the simple search for elementary material forms, composition, colors, figures, geometries), but also the narrative elaboration starting from ''minimal'' programs (a minimalism in short, of content). I mention all this because Vinicio Momoli's works are evidently ''minimalist'' (in fact, I am certainly not the first to notice this). And at this point I would like to make the modest proposal to glimpse in Momoli the expression of both meanings of ''minimal''. We will see that, however, in a moment. Allow me, instead, to open a parenthesis on the reasons why minimalism made its way in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The fact is that the past decade has been characterized by a sort of ''drunk'' on complexity. What many have called ''postmodern taste'' or which I have instead baptized ''neo-baroque taste'' consisted precisely in the search, often ironic, for the complication of formal and narrative models of art.

The use of quotation, the return of the figurative, the pleasure for unstable and chaotic figures were all essential traits of that taste. It seems clear to me that today the panorama of artistic research is returning to reflect on what we can define as "elementary" as opposed to the "complex", on the "simple" as opposed to the elaborate, on the "pure" ' as opposed to ''pastiche''. Which is even an obvious fact, if you consider that the dogma of the search for originality, sanctioned by the historical avant-gardes, has become current practice in the arts, and forces us to constantly rethink artistic practice, to overcome that obsolescence that an obligatory search of the original leads as a necessary consequence of the consumption of forms.

Momoli is therefore part of a tendency to rediscover the forms, figures, compositions and minimal materials of art. We glimpse it in the rigor of the contrasts: black and white are the two dominant colours, and any chromatism (the red stripes, for example) is always inserted as an ''included third'' in the composition. Almost as if the two opposing colors are the basis, the support of communication, and the added color functions as a contrast to the main pair. Note, moreover, that Momoli's objects can be generically defined as ''sculptures'' (a highly inappropriate term in our case, but which nevertheless indicates their three-dimensionality). Now, the traditional perception of sculpture is very ''colourless'': in the sense at least that its manifestations are most often not chromatized in a pictorial sense, but possess either the ''natural'' color of its materials, or the coloration resulting from operations on materials (polishing, chrome plating, scratching, tarnishing, etc. etc.). It therefore seems to me that in Momoli what is ''sculpted'' you enter into collusion or combination with what is ''painted''.

His works therefore narrate the meeting or clash between two arts, to the point that one might sometimes say that in his three-dimensional objects there is the memory, yes, of the sculptural experimentalism of the beginning of the century or of the post-war period, but combined with that of the pictorial avant-gardes such as Suprematism.
Malevich and above all El Lissitzky encountered art-brut, and they had fun with it. This observation, however, risks becoming a serious matter. As we can see, in fact, in Momoli's elementary experimentalism we begin to glimpse something that is not purely functionalist and rationalist.
We also discovered the quotation, the metalanguage, a second degree aesthetics and at this point we must recognize, therefore, that his minimalism is not at all a repetition of what has already passed, but rather a revisitation or a rereading. Which forces us to think about it a very general principle, namely that when we talk, as often happens in the critical vernacular, of ''returns'', we should be very careful about what we say. There is no such thing as an ''innocent'' return. Returning to the scene of the crime is done with the expertise of the past and a passionate attitude of the present which come together to create an absolutely non-repetitive product. In short, you never get wet twice. times in the same river, much less can it be done in art.

Momoli is truly an artist characterized by this sophisticated attention to a rationalism experienced in a manneristic way, that is, to a search for simplification of the artistic language complicated by the nod to his "manners" of previous decades. This means that when today we glimpse the unfolding of events similar to his, we must not speak lightly of the ''end of postmodernity'', but of a change in figurative taste, while the internal taste, that for the artistic structure and his meanings are now compromised by what has happened in the years that have just passed. In fact, here is the general point that I would like to point out, taking inspiration from Momoli: when we deal with an artist or an ongoing trend, it is best to never stop at the labels that take charge of the aspect of that artist or that trend surface, the figures precisely. Because in reality labels of this type never say much about the individual creator, and are often casual and occasional, if not even impertinent, given that today most artists tend to choose and produce highly individual figures, an idiolect of their own.

Instead, we must also grasp the most internal aspect of the works, their adaptation to an encyclopedia "the spirit of the time" and to a way of theorizing the very meaning of the artistic intervention. From this perspective, we could then say that Momoli is an authoritative representative of one ongoing trend that rejects from a figurative point of view the neo-mimicry developed in recent years, and seeks a more abstract and more ''linguistic'' experimental language. From a structural point of view, however, his works continue to take into account a still unexhausted story of taste, that of the artist's reflection on himself and his relationship with the past.

Omar Calabrese
Exhibition catalogue, UNESCO Palace,
Espace "Picasso" - Paris 1991