Through a detailed historic-critical framing, supported by an extensive anthology of his writings, “poetry” and criticism, this volume offers the first “reasoned” cataloguing of the paintings of one of the protagonists of European art in the second half of the 20th century, Mattia Moreni (1920–1999), reconstructing the various moments of his work that, for over half a century, never lost confidence in the communicative possibilities of painting as a “means”, in a style of powerful iconic impressiveness.
From his earliest experiences amidst post-cubism and “mechanistic” abstraction to the centrality of his great “informal” season, and beyond, from a vigorous “neo-expressionism” and provocative “self-portraits”, to an enthusiastic “regression of the species” (as physiological as it was imaginative), all the way up to his very full “comic-book” repertoire, of residual “humanoids” lying in wait. This is the documentation of a powerfully exciting imaginative adventure, a warning against a shared destiny – that still looms large – of a collective regressive genetic and mental mutation.
