Mattia Moreni: From Expressionist Vision to Digital Premonition

 Mattia Moreni was born in Pavia in 1920 and died in Brisighella in 1999, the town in Emilia-Romagna to which he had moved in 1966. Over the course of a career spanning more than five decades, he evolved from a visionary expressionism rooted in the observation of the natural and human world into a late body of work that anticipated the electronic and digital transformation of art itself.
From the mid-1930s, Moreni favoured a naturalistic vision of things, figures, houses and landscapes; by the early 1940s he had also turned to portraiture. This language took shape during his studies at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin, where he developed introspective images marked by expressionistic intensity. His first solo exhibition, held in 1946 at Galleria La Bussola in Turin, presented paintings and drawings from this formative period. Visionary expressionism and deliberately destabilising images appeared in the guise of close-up compositions of fruit or animals. Already visible in these early studies were traits that would remain central to his later practice: a preference for totalising images rendered in shallow perspective and crowded by the “enlarged presence of objects,” together with an expressionistic, deforming tremor that moved far beyond the dialectal, illustrative or folkloristic conventions of local painting and beyond the Nordic or more precisely Flemish models to which such work was sometimes compared.
In the second half of the 1940s Moreni opened himself to a more international dialogue, drawn to the non-figurative stimuli of neo-Cubism. Between 1948 and 1949 his research took a decisively abstract turn, confirmed by exhibitions at Galleria del Milione in Milan (1947 and 1949) and by his participation in the Venice Biennale of 1950. International recognition followed with the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil in 1951 and the Mostra Nazionale d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan in 1952.
Decades later, between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, Moreni devoted himself to an intensive series of self-portraits. The Autoritratti signalled both a thematic and a linguistic evolution. Handwritten texts were inscribed directly onto the images, yet these scripts bore no chronological correspondence to the painted faces; they addressed the artist’s past while simultaneously projecting a hypothetical future. In this phase the force of expression took clear precedence over any accurate identification of psychosomatic features. The works were shown at the XXIX Premio Campigna in Santa Sofia di Romagna in 1985 and again in the same location in 1991 and 1992.
Gradually the relations between image, background and script were simplified until they reached an essential form in the Umanoidi of 1993. In this extensive series, exhibited in two solo shows in 1994–95 and later in Ravenna (1996) and Faenza (1999), the human face and mind are replaced by a technological box that alludes to a computer. The figures become hybrid beings whose identity is no longer organic but electronic.
As one commentator observed, “Moreni paints the premonition that, on its way towards an electronic and digital future, art will never be the same again.” In the Umanoidi that premonition receives its most radical and enduring visual form.