The regression of the species

It is becoming increasingly clear that the major figures representing an original and vigorous—indeed, extremely vigorous—Italian contribution to “neo-expressionism” are Mattia Moreni (1920–1999), Giacomo Fieschi (1921), and Sergio Vacchi (1925). In ways that are individually distinct yet comparable, their first significant phase took place as leading figures of Informalism in the 1950s; then, differently but along personal lines that are to some extent ideally connectable, they each developed, from the early 1960s in the case of Moreni and Vacchi, and from the early 1950s in the case of Fieschi, proposals for a new figuration, marked by heightened expressive tension: more ironically expressionist and insurrectional in Moreni’s case, more visionary in an introspective sense with eschatological revelations in Fieschi’s. These are forms of figuration strongly critical of a deep reality—both individual and collective—now threatened by an alienating consumerist homogenisation that tends to erase identity and anthropological heritage. They are the only realities compatible with the path of a Baselitz, active since the early 1960s, or of an Immendorff, or in particular a Kiefer, active since the 1970s.

A retrospective survey of Moreni’s career, curated by Franco and Roberta Calarota (Silvana Editoriale catalog), is on view at the Magazzini del Sale in Cervia until 7 September. An expressionist root is clearly present already in his early youthful works in the mid-1940s, and it is confirmed shortly thereafter in the dynamic synthesis of strongly incisive constructions through which, between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, Moreni responded in an original way to the period of post-cubist success, uninterested in narrative developments in favour of a strongly emblematic impact of the image. From the mid-1950s onward this becomes increasingly epic and graphic in the dense applications of painterly matter characteristic of his Informal phase. At the beginning of the 1960s the artist moved toward images aimed at signifying the invasive “regression of the species,” at the mercy of a technological pervasiveness that atrophies functions while replacing them with electronic prostheses. And this is the great theme of his graffiti-based period from the mid-1980s through the 1990s.