Eugenio Mombelli, who is an informal painter, entitles his mixed works using oil, enamel, collage and sand as if they were figural subjects, thus with Sunset on the Carnival of Venice, Objects in Movement and Evening Fragments he appears to allude to an explicitly recognisable pictorial plot.

This seems to reveal the stages of an evolution that started from different points, from a justly non-renounced source brought to the surface in the semblance of a story, where the visible is covered in lovely fabric-matter.

Mombelli also creates fragmented paintings in which he highlights writings, quotations and verses, in the same manner as the visual poets of the nineteen seventies.

These graffiti, mostly on a black background, cannot be associated with a conceptual intervention, rather they appear to ask the observer to hold a message, a trace of memory.

This way of working clearly reveals the study of American avant-garde in the fifties, whereas he has an inborn need to draw attention to language as a legible form and to masses that move in space to create perspectives.

They are pulsating matter, the emergence

of chromatic effects in which black prevails, white by contrast takes on an illuminating function, and red and yellow play unsettling counterpoint.

The pictorial matter of these works has highly unusual vibrant qualities and makes the viewer go beyond the spatial structure to capture the unsaid, which may be an object, or a distant landscape covered by spreads that delineate breaches and windows, equilibrium and imbalance.

A closer look reveals that the construct is supported by a cancellation of the figure, due not so much to an iconoclastic need as to paradoxical preservation of the actual image by means of a covering that still allows the shape to be perceived.

The decorative writings in the margin express an enigmatic poetic intent, a literal embodiment of lyrical vocation. In this type of painting, only apparently created straight off, the exasperating masses of colour blend according to an in-depth study of tonal ratios and under the banner of highly-controlled instinctiveness.

Mombelli’s shapeless shapes are achieved using a palette prepared with masterly skill, where the quality of the colour blends in shades regulated by a method of composition that leaves nothing to chance.

These are expressions of warm, soft painting of noble ancestry ñ considering certain connections with Marcel Tapié’s informal lyricism - in which his work with the thickness of matter is more like casting a mould than spreading proper.

This combined technique exhausts the potential of non-shape, which ends up by appearing as an intensely compelling pro-active message. In this case, the painting mainly embodies emotion, the emotion experienced when listening to atonal music, with counterpoint now sharp and dry, now distended, but always of a highly expressive perfection.

As for the writing, its function of completion lies precisely in the linearity that interrupts the uniform shade of the backgrounds, like a vibration or counter-melody.

The material sensitivity of this artist, who basically works on transfiguring shapes, reproduces without violence a cancellation of the world, which can be read as a statement of his independence from the traditional rules of representation, and from the ideological misrepresentations of so many avant-gardists.

by “ I giudizi di Sgarbi ” Editoriale

Giorgio Mondadori, Milano ( April 2005 )