RENATO BARILLI

Chromatic ferment

Renato Barilli Momoli, or the triumph of the connection.

It is immediately evident that Vinicio Momoli's work is inspired by Minimalism, a great and essential movement that emerged in the context of the 1968 revolution, above all because it taught everyone the need to invade space with massive forms and total material inertia. But that movement, in the versions of the main exponents, Bob Morris, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and even in Dan Flavin's neons, suffered from an annoying flaw, that is, it confirmed the dependence on a morphological code based on the right angle, on the sharp dihedral and other solutions of total subjection to the old geometric abstractionism, even if renewed by introducing strong doses of pure materiality into it.

After all, the leader Morris soon understood the partial out-of-dateness of their first version and turned the product upside down by practicing a radical Anti-form, relying on typically soft materials, such as soft and sagging felts.
Momoli also made this decisive correction, making use of materials that were mostly of organic origin, wood, fabric, or even stone, from the beginning of his journey, but coming from remote geological excavations, from which he also took the modality it is the primordial of stratification, proceeding at multiple and overlapping levels.
But above all, to avoid the rigors of geometric abstraction, our artist resorted to two expedients: the introduction of colour, a factor completely ignored by the Minimalists in their early days, who wanted only the character to speak hard of metal surfaces.

Momoli, on the other hand, has pleasantly spaced out the various positions, as a good housewife would do when preparing a dish of lasagna, then proceeding to alternately place a layer of pasta and an overlapping layer of seasoning, generally overabundant and therefore overflowing beyond the space assigned to it. Moving from the domestic code of the kitchen to the equally original one of the art of masonry, we could also say that, just like a bricklayer in laying brick upon brick, Momoli ensured that the lime came out of the edges.
But above all, he wanted the force of gravity to come into play, and therefore, those layers, although lying horizontally, became pot-bellied at their centre, suffering the weight of what was accumulated above them. In this way we could also say that ours immediately transitioned to the Antiform phase, without being overwhelmed too much by the needs of formal rigorism. This also happened when, in apparent compliance with the initial precepts of Minimalism, it abandoned the poor and spontaneous materials of a home-made masonry art to adopt metal sheets, perhaps ventilating a design intent on manufacturing table tops according to impeccable methods, and therefore with tense horizontality.
But even in this case it seems to me that we can always glimpse a bending of those planes at their centre, also victims of a provident force of gravity ready to insert a note of organicity.

After all, it is enough to examine the global title that Momoli gives to his various proposals, Nexiture, a neologism full of multipurpose meanings. There is the notion of weaving, confirming an inspiration that is still of organic origin. In fact, fabrics are found in nature, or even in artificial products, as long as they are made of soft fibers ultimately obtained from the plant or animal world. The concept of contextually binding is then reiterated by that nexus ready to be added, and thus to reiterate the desire to arrive at an original and unmistakable proposal. Then there are other useful variations to this "connection", to this Gordian knot, which the artist decides to break with an eloquent gesture.
Sometimes the layers of stone rise vertically, but this does not prevent the artist's desire to leave a mark on them, in fact it seems that he intends to hurl himself against them, pierce them from side to side, impressing a negative shape on them. This is also a way of declaring that minimal materials never have the last word, but that the artist always intends to leave an imprint on them. Or he sets about composing them together, trying to box them together, even here, basically, acting like our remote ancestors who, to build places of refuge, put together slabs taken from the ground.

In short, the idea of the ligament governs all of Momoli's production, to the point that sometimes he decides to do without solids and highlight only the voids, exposing the network of contours that should have framed the different fragments. taken from the outside world. Then again there is a tribute to Minimalism, in Flavin's version, as Momoli does not give up on entrusting his decision to make the connection with the use of neon.
Everything holds together, everything is connected, in a vast DIY operation played on multiple keys.

Renato Barilli Exhibition catalogue "Nexiture"
Torre Civica - Castelfranco Veneto (TV)
Abbazia di Spineto - Sarteano (SI)