ROBERTO DAOLIO

catalog of the exhibition held at Giorgione Home

The practical and operational indications of this final part of the Eighties seem to increasingly make use, especially by the very latest generations, of a sort of generic use of modules, if not actual "models", neo-minimal and neo-geometric . Assumed, at times, without any in-depth analysis or verification of the historical and theoretical reasons of a recent past, read as distant and veiled by the urgency of a reaction to everything that was universally exalted and magnified only yesterday. To the great magma of generalized quotation and not filtered by the subtle contribution of critical intelligence, required and made necessary and indispensable by the postmodern condition, confusing undeclared withdrawals continue to be combined in an attempt to avoid the burdens and commitments of linguistic and expressive legacies that are increasingly difficult to safeguard for a once again productive commitment.

This is not the case with Vinicio Momoli and, in particular, with the most recent works presented for the occasion with the in-depth analysis of a series of space-environmental relationships, completely in tune with the needs of a thematic and "formal" reflection . Despite the evident and important exaltation and investigation of the so-called surface-values, which have already been addressed in the past through the candid monochromatic rigor of clear textural scans, always interrupted and lacerated by a tear or a chipping, Momoli is now also approaching autonomous volumetric consistency and, consequently, a new spatial impact and a corporeity as the affirmation of a full, physical event to be balanced in dimensions without giving up the contrasts and "qualities" of a sensitive material to light variations. The black, to which Momoli relies, is not "a nothing without possibility", "a dead nothing after the sun goes out" of Kandisky's memory... nor is it a deaf, gloomy "black", devoid of " sonority" and "extinct". On the contrary, it is and becomes a somewhat active condition for enhancing a concerted combination of differences and variations. Whether it is absorbed by the wood as a smooth, flat and uniform background, or whether it is left to vibrate and almost quiver with reflections, when it emerges from the plasticity of the mixture as a revelation and discovery of the supporting metal weave. Even when it is placed next to and brought closer to a red band, to underline the pure "pictorial" essence of a contrast aimed at modifying the data perceptive. To isolate it as a whole and, at the same time, to mark and give rhythm to a gap, a difference, which offers itself as a possibility of relationship and as a heated and ardent redundancy. At this point it is easy to sense the meaning of a research that does not want to be consumed in cold geometricism of contrasts or combinations variously modulated in a necessary but not indispensable compositional economy.

Momoli's rigor is highlighted and manifested perhaps at its highest level in the double soul of his work. On the one hand, the full and conscious formal adherence to surfaces that are almost intact but treated, smoothed and "blackened" like planes or backgrounds to be canceled out in a dark and gloomy depth. on the other, the material overlap-integration of a sensitive, covering substance, determined to fray at the edges and corrode the silent load-bearing structure of the support. To the point, at times, of rising into the almost mirror-like "double" of a fragment, of a figural shred exhibited in a skilful balance of well-defined plastic values barely scratched by the dense network of outcrops and "highlighted" graphite textures.

In this sense, two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality avoid a generic crystallization and exchange and mutualize their respective qualities in a stable relationship destined to modify the directions, accents and values of absence and presence, of emptiness and fullness, of surface, background and plastic object. In supporting with conviction a "frontality" ostentatious and exhibited in the sensitive features of luminous variations, Momoli assumes and declines the phenomenal data in the order of a continuous, uninterrupted flow. As if the controlled physicality of the thicknesses and "capacities", modulated on the seriality of the plots, could come to life and proliferate beyond the concrete and conditioning limits of a format.
There's no denying it's a hodgepodge of references or of "quotations", more or less codified by the intransigence of our time, can be extended and applied to the "independent variables" of all of Momoli's work (always, however, with the careful and due precautions mentioned at the beginning) . Precisely because the all too easy comparisons to Burri on the one hand and Castellani or Fontana on the other, can intervene to hegemonize and give credence to a hypothesis of univocal interpretation and, perhaps, far from the free "disenchantment" in which we love to recognize ourselves.

Roberto Daolio
Catalog of the exhibition held at Giorgione home,
Castelfranco Veneto, (Treviso) 1989