Composizione 777

Natural elements – brambles, perhaps, or bushes – appear, transfigured, behind the dark, wooden barrier of rustic fencing. Or are they not, on the contrary, mere signs, colours, geometries that trouble the surface? As always in his early years of artistic maturity, Moreni oscillates between the imperfect memory of a piece of reality and a fully abstract intention; and he deliberately allows the figure to balance between these two vocations. But he still brings to the image a slant, a cramp, almost a malevolence, that will stay with him over time and, through the changing stylistic orientations, will constitute essential characteristics of his.
This was the year of Moreni’s adhesion to the Group of Eight, which, taking up the legacy of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti and with a slightly modified composition (the addition of Afro and Moreni, the departure of Guttuso, Pizzinato and others, who created an opposing front of realism), had the ambition of being the most prestigious and “modern” group of artists of the middle generation. Moreni’s contribution to the group, which generally tended to a post-Cubist stylistic approach, was a more agitated gestural art, an impetus in composing and crowding together the elements of his figures that is paralleled, among his fellow artists, only by Emilio Vedova (born in 1919, the year before Moreni). Though aseptically entitled just “Composition”, the resulting image heralds the urgency of speech, the propensity for shouting, that would mark Moreni’s future years.