Tiziano Santi

exhibition catalogue, Gallery "Crossing"

Momoli's objects are very sophisticated syntheses of heterogeneous elements, a sort of figures of complexity that stand in a balance to the second power: their "discordant concord" is calibrated in a neoclassical calm. They are structured on a number of different polarities.
First of all the materials: wrapping paper, wood, iron. metal grids whose apexes emerge from layers of mortar very often pigmented in black, materials of the "poverist" practice, which however reveal in their treatment an unusual richness and refinement, materials which are warm in themselves, which however are cooled, turned off.
The forms, however, come from the abstract tradition or rather from the minimalism of primary geometries, with large monochrome surfaces; and to contradict the reductionist desire, some layers of material, grid and mortar, almost as if they were bark, are modeled on the baroqueness of soft curvatures that create cavities, recesses, from which light graphics sometimes emerge, and therefore shadows that alternate with light in the ever-new game of hiding and revealing. But as we move forward, other tensions can be discovered: the one between the heaviness of the materials and the lightness of the visual rendering, the contrasts of brightness and opacity, of absorbing and reflecting light. In the latest works, which refer to incongruous furniture, tables, chairs, instruments for indecipherable uses and rites, there is a wink to Robert Gober, form and function, memory of use and absorbed contemplation are put in an irresolvable short circuit.

Opposition and harmony, heterogeneity and simplicity, heat and cold, explosion and implosion, these are the categories that for Momoli must compose their tension in the work. A tour de force that is enhanced in a "cold sensuality", in a cerebral hedonism which, with a borrowed word, could be defined as neo-baroque. And in fact Momoli's objects seem to be agudezas, "wits", sophisms. Each of their elements becomes a metaphor for the opposite, dragged into a continuous metamorphosis, in a translation that exchanges perceptions and meanings. Oxymorons therefore, if we want to attempt a parallel with the figures of verbal language, "oxymorons" which however do not remain a mere rhetorical fact and become ways of sensing and manifesting the essential ambiguity of things.

Tiziano Santi
exhibition catalogue, Gallery "Crossing"
Portogruaro (Venice) 1992