Hints at figures and landscapes that emerge,

out of context, as distant references

After a purely figurative start, Eugenio Mombelli chose the path of “obscured figurativeness”, and, by doing so, achieved optimal results. Within surfaces that were generally dark – or, by contrast, candid, of a colour half-way between chalk and snow – there open up apparently informal windows or scraps of a veiled narration, which emerge from the material of the painting like passages from a novel, or quotations or voices that reach us from a distance. Figurative or chromatic fragments from which it is impossible to trace back to the narrative whole, just like the biceps of a fresco that reappear when the mortar detaches itself from ancient plastering. This is the artist’s message, the impossibility of forming, in modern times, a vision of the whole. The twentieth century has irremediably compromised the possibility of representing the human figure. The twentieth century has annihilated, at an artistic level, the unity of time and place that was depicted on the canvas. This same century has, generally speaking, with the passing of the hermetic period, promoted the lyrical fragment of poetry as the oracular expressive whole.

For this reason, Mombelli uses details to open a questioning breach in the canvas, transforming the work into an Ivory-like “Room with a View”, namely a shadowy space which, suddenly, is penetrated by a blinding light and, with it, the abnormal detail of a monument, which imprints itself upon the pupil dilated by permanence in the dark. This recourse to the black background was something Mombelli took from his beloved Caravaggio, the painter who, with his dramatic and angled lighting, struck the heart of painting like a slingshot in the early seventeenth century. In this way, the views which Mombelli offers the spectator – inserted within an informal framework of an elevated character, with compositional balances rendered by chromatic weights and graphic counter-weights, graffiti and rough materials – are those of a particular detail removed from its context. At a thematic level, there are two paths that the artist follows in his later period: the first, which appears to cite elegant background paintings, is dominated essentially by elements that recall the fresco (there are elegant sanguines, references to sinopites, strokes of paintings with a mural consistence washed away by an internal time), the architectonic forms, completed by incomprehensible writings, drawn or carved in an elongated script that, in its graceful acuteness, recalls German, which is the great grandchild of Gothic. The irruption of this writing in the picture tends to emphasise the idea of fragmentation of perception, which is forced to move within a pulverulent essence. Just as those snatches of painting deriving from black or midnight blue are in-finite details, so the words of a non-existent language underline the oracular character of Mombelli’s painting, which captures the user with a charade that must be resolved through understanding the sense. The second path is that of the “obscured landscapes”. Here, in place of the graphic-pictorial elements taken from the distant past, there reappear the colours of landscapes, always enclosed by non-geometrical masks which, with their gaps of dark obscurity, prevent the complete view of the panorama.

At this point, it is worth considering the painting techniques employed by Mombelli, in order to fully understand what “obscuring” means. The artist does not start from the informal in order to arrive at the abstract. During the first outline of the work, he delineates figuratively on the canvas the subject or the landscape. Therefore, the elements of this first phase are easily legible, Subsequently, Mombelli intervenes in palimpsest with a covering colour, leaving irregular eye-holes, breaches or windows through which the underlying painting emerges and pulses; then, by means of writing applied to neutral areas, contextualisations and squares drawn with wax pastels, the artist handles, on the new surface, the compositional balances that belong strictly to an informal language. “Imagine – he says - that from the depth of my painting there emerges a red field and a blue half-moon. Our perception is immediately drawn first towards the emission of the red. However, if I surround the blue half-moon with writing, our eye immediately gives it the priority of vision, considering the red field only later”). Let’s turn now to see the route taken by Eugenio Mombelli. It all started in the Seventies. At that time, the young artist, with his formative years in the Arts High School and the Faculty of Architecture, was working mainly with fully recognisable subjects, which largely consisted of the figurative exploration of the female universe. Yet, even in those attempts, he was weighing up his dissatisfaction with a relationship that was still too close to academic painting, to its revealed identification, and to the strong link between meaning and significance. The figure, whatever it might be, appeared excessively revealed, especially in the convulsive iconoclastic segments of the twentieth century, which had left painters with little room for research within the purely figurative. The human figure seemed to be declaring not only its own banality, but the attribution to it of sugary and totally obsolete language. Mombelli decided to deny himself the full vision and intervened upon the faces and bodies of the women with geometric masks. Between the Eighties and Nineties, his figures reached a further synthesis, along the way to an “internal vision”. The real move towards the abstract treatment of a figurative base came about between 1990 and 1995 when, having abandoned the geometry of the masks, the masses and the balances, the biceps of figures and the compact background painting began to reach elevated standards of chromatic and compositional harmony, before which the eye is sated and the mind projects the sequences of an internal story.