Mattia Moreni

"Mattia Moreni was born in Pavia in 1920 and died in Brisighella (where he had moved to in 1966) in 1999. From the mid-1930s, Moreni favoured a naturalistic vision of things, figures, houses and landscapes, and, towards the 1940s, also portraits. It was a language that had developed during his studies at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, where he proposed introspective images with expressionistic tones. His first solo exhibition dates from 1946, at Galleria La Bussola in Turin, with paintings and drawings from the period when his visionary expressionism and destabilizing images took on the semblance of close-up compositions of fruit or animals. Standing out in these studies are some important aspects for his following career: the inclination to propose totalizing images, with a shallow perspective crowded with the “enlarged presence of objects” and an expressionistic, deforming tremor which went “way beyond the dialectal and illustrative and folkloristic order” of local derivations of “Nordic or more precisely Flemish models”. As of the second half of the 1940s, Moreni opened up to a more international dialogue, fascinated by non-figurative neo-cubist stimuli. In 1948-49 his research took an abstract bent (Galleria del Milione, Milan, 1947 and 1949; Venice Biennale, 1950) and his language gained international recognition with his participation at the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (1951) and Mostra Nazionale d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan (1952)...Between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, the artist devoted himself to self-portraits, with a series of Autoritratti denouncing an evolution in themes and language, accompanied by handwritten scripts of the image with no chronological correspondence to the images (dealing with his past, but also a hypothetical future). In this phase, the force of expression, rather than identification of the actual psychosomatic features, continued to take precedence (XXIX Premio Campigna, Santa Sofia di Romagna, 1985; and again in the same place, 1991 and 1992). The relations between image, background and script would continue to be simplified, resulting in the essential Umanoidi (1993) figures, a vast series of works displayed in two solo shows in 1994-95 in which the features consist of a technological box, alluding to a computer, which replaces the person’s face and mind (Ravenna, 1996; Faenza, 1999). […] “Moreni paints the premonition that, on its way towards an electronic and digital future, art will never be the same again."(alleriailponte.com)