Galleria d’Arte Maggiore g.a.m. presents a new exhibition dedicated to Mattia Moreni (1920– 1999), one among the most unconventional artists of the post-war period, , focused on the final period of his production: Umanoidi cycle (Humanoids), in which the artist anticipated with extraordinary clarity the anthropological transformations brought about the advent of the information age. The homage comes to life at the gallery's Parisian venue, bringing Moreni's work back to the French capital, where he lived for a decade starting in 1956 following the advice of Michel Tapié, and where his international success was firmly established. Presenting the Umanoidi cycle once again in Paris today means re-establishing an ideal dialogue with the cultural context that first embraced and recognized the innovative scope of his artistic language. The works selected for the exhibition convey Moreni's disquieting and prophetic pictorial vision, one capable of grasping the tensions between humanity and technology long before their full contemporary manifestation.
In the Umanoidi cycle, created between 1995 and 1999, Mattia Moreni develops one of the most radical and visionary reflections of his artistic research. The figures inhabiting these works appear as mutating organisms, suspended between biological body and technological device, traversed by signs, writings, grafts, and deformations that transform painting into a territory of constant tension. Moreni foresaw with extraordinary foresight the perceptual and anthropological revolution destined to arise from the advent of the computer: a transformation capable of altering not only the tools of communication, but the very structure of vision and thought itself. Just as movable-type printing and the invention of perspective during the Renaissance simultaneously redefined the transmission of knowledge and the way of seeing the world, in the same way, for Moreni, the digital revolution inaugurated a new era of perception, destined to profoundly reshape humanity's relationship with reality, the body, and the image. This awareness also emerges clearly in the words the artist inscribed on the canvas L'avanguardia e l'elettronica in avanzata... (1995): “electronics advancing will prevent us recognising those called artists who will work with computers, with another mind, for another looking at the revolution of life without idealties... WHY?”
Through a gestural, aggressive and highly textural style of painting, Moreni creates images of extraordinary expressive energy, in which irony, unease and socio-cultural criticism coexist. The Humanoids embody a condition of progressive regression of the species that Moreni theorises in several volumes containing his monologues, such as L'ignoranza fluida (1979) and L'assurdo razionale perché necessario (1989): technological evolution seems to proceed in parallel with a loss of consciousness, sensitivity and identity. In these works, technology appears as an ambiguous force that alters humanity and accelerates its decline. Painting thus becomes an instrument of existential inquiry, capable of computing with surprising insight the contradictions of the contemporary world and the risk of an irreversible transformation of humankind.
If we consider the technological developments the artist did not live to see, the current ubiquity of social media, the spread of artificial intelligence, the widespread disorientation in the information age, the relevance of this latest series stands out with singular force. The questions Moreni posed from his studio in Brisighella are precisely those facing our era: what remains of the human when the machine thinks, creates and decides in its place? His work is not a warning from the past; it is a mirror held up to the present.
