Stefano momente
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Biography
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Born in Jesolo, Venice, in 1961, under the sign of Leo, Stefano Momente has always expressed himself using forms and colours. His early work was characterised by a marked figuration, which he later abandoned in favour of a representation of mankind's inner self, in an ongoing experimentation of different techniques and materials.
Momente later focused his research on the informal, to propose a new, symbolic materiality, through layers of differently textured colours, where traces, signs and graffiti are reminiscent of action painting.
Stefano Momente
Via Levantina, 169
30017 Lido di Jesolo (Venice)
Tel. 348 3311280
stef@nextitalia.it
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Statement
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Momente's art
Art as a quest, memory, experience.
Portrayal of the intimate, external projection of profound emotions and sentiments, layered in layers, signs, graffiti, etchings. Developed by brush- and spatula strokes, it rests, settles and ripens, just like a memory of our life.
An art that is representation and therefore a symbol. Using diverse techniques and materials, but with a preference for mural work, involving frescoes, engraving, etching and throwing paint.
Recovering symbols and archetypes, and using them as a universal language. Because if true art is only objective, as Gurdjieff claimed, it must nevertheless pass through the filter of the artist.
And this is a language that develops technically on a rich subsoil: from Burri to Tapies, from Afro to Celiberti. It is an ongoing, intimate and spiritual quest. Evolution. The alchemy of colour and that of the spirit.
In a spirit course the obsessively tends towards the Centre.
His works are born almost always without a precise design, but nevertheless with great attention to the backgrounds, carefully prepared to take the colours.
But then they develop instinctively, one colour upon another, opening the way between scratches and dribbling, before emerging.
As though they had always been there, on the canvas, in the colours, the brushes and the tip of the graving tool.
And only by bringing it all together can they be freed.
Sometimes paint is arranged on the canvas like geological layers of an earth suddenly opened.
They rush from within without distinction or precedence, in a causal, but certainly not random, gesture.
And they continue to boil before their final rest, which is sometimes a while later.
Between one layer and the next there is rarely temporal continuity. A work may await the arrival of the sign that makes it complete for a long time.
Or the flow of colour may start the dialogue rolling again.
The same embryonic composition contains a title. That integrates and crystallises the work. A magical nomen that spurts like lava and confirms its existence as it solidifies.
Title and work therefore form a solid, undividable whole.
And this is why, for Momente, there is no such thing as an untitled work.
Stefano Momente's abstract naturalism
March 2004
I believe Stefano Momente to be the Veneto artist (Jesolo 1961) of greatest rigour and conscience with regards to both the lesson of the historical avant garde and the development of his limpid painting, built on a knowing weave of memory and present, of sensitive notations and "abstract naturalism", enhanced by the new symbols of mass communication (numbers, letters), that struggles to renounce the possession of a reality that is always in movement, mysterious in its phenomena that always require deciphering.
The leitmotif of this artist of lively genius, is a great poetry, a continuous quest for the reason behind things, from outside to inside, of material and of light, of shape and of movement, of objectivity and of symbols.
I could not help but be won over by Stefano Momente's continuity and happiness of developments, within the context of non-experimental art, but one that always experiments in the language of painting.
In Momente's work, the recent episodes of culture and artistic expression, in the sense of a recovery and, better still, of an attentive regeneration committed to external "reality", through the filter of an inner vision (dreamt reality) and therefore of a "psychological reality", are highlighted by happy paintings like "Fuori e dentro di me", "Alla continua ricerca di Atlantide", "Dall'anima universale", "Solo il cuore indica la via", "Ogni cosa increata" or "Gnosis", with regard to both the precious chromatic attitude and the inspired ability of evocation in an alternative suggestion of objects and atmospheres that are hardly impressed in the memory, moments of light and allusions to fantastical presence of rare expressive efficiency.
Many of Stefano Momente's works seem traced in the wet shoreline of a sea coloured with pink, yellow and blue, or on the wall of an ancient memory. In his works we can see how the artist, in an entwined description of melancholy sentiment, gradually succeeds in widening the terms of his dialogue with nature: first with an objective statement, and then slowly unfolding, on objects and his light, a more intense, subtle vibration of the inner fantasy.
The "Manifesto" on art penned by the artist himself describes art as quest, memory, experience: a form of painting that recovers symbols and archetypes, immediate and instinctive.
Aldo Trivellato writes that Momente's art is not abstract because it does not abandon the figure (symbol) and observes beyond appearances.
I prefer to talk about "abstract naturalism", because even abstraction originates from the observation of nature, of reality seen not by the eye, but with the heart and feelings.
Momente causes a stark contrast between the material that almost by analogy would appear the relief of a fresco, the sinuosity of the scratches that glint in the sun, the cut of the light; an irradiated and irritated dribble, that runs across soft jersey planes, magically and expertly prepared as in the basal alchemy of fourteenth century artists.
I would go so far as to say that it is exactly the conscience of these general ideas to raise Momente's imagination, beyond fragmentism, in an exciting, pathos-loaded perspective that gives symbols back their function.
A surface painted by Stefano Momente lives by virtue of the intensity of the emotion that inspired it and through the oddness of the symbols and the strength that justifies it.
The cardinal point of Momente's abstraction is not the entire disregard of formalism, but the essential reconstruction of part of it. In the works of this artist, abstraction is not the total denial of reality, but rather reality itself is the essence of what it transmits in the very moment in which it is observed and analysed. An instant later, both reality and its essence alter and therefore the abstraction takes on a new meaning.
Stefano Momente's "abstract naturalism", which is released by his work, is perfectly definable: his abstract pictures can be considered the psychoanalysis of a figurative picture, his abstraction intends literally to drag, separate or filter the spiritual content from reality.
With his art made of colours and symbols, Stefano Momente throws a probe into our subconscious, with the intent of exploring the most intimate motions of our "ego" and our perturbations.
Momente offers an original interpretation of abstraction, a new vision of perception, an unprecedented, synthetic translation of light, movement and forms, a "mystic" vision of the continuity between heaven and earth, in a continuous amalgamation in a mixture of art, scenery and architecture.
Stefano Momente's is art with a "licence to thrill", thanks to the originality of the form, the precious chromatic harmony of the limpid light.
We would need to bother psychology (science of the soul) to explain the true meaning, the innermost meaning, of his works, that appear as psychic projections of the artist onto canvas.
Observing Stefano Momente's work, one might say that it is not true that painting has nothing more to say, because in form and colour and through the shades of sensitivity, there is still infinite space.
Eraldo Di Vita
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Exhibitions
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Recent exhibitions
1999
LIDO DI JESOLO - Casa Bianca al Mare - collettiva
2000
LIDO DI JESOLO - Casa Bianca al Mare - collettiva
JESOLO - Peech Wine Bar e Enoiteca La Caneva - collettiva
2001
LIDO DI JESOLO - Casa Bianca al Mare - collettiva
LIDO DI JESOLO - Ristorante al Granso - collettiva
2002
VELDEN (Austria) - Volksbank di Velden - personale
LIDO DI JESOLO - Casa Bianca al Mare - collettiva
2003
JESOLO - Casa Bianca al Mare - collettiva
ERACLEA MARE - Galleria Heraclia Art - Del colore e l'alchimia - personale
LIDO DI JESOLO - Peech Wine Bar - personale
LIDO DI VENEZIA - Palazzo del Cinema / Biennale d'Arte - Del colore e l'alchimia - personale
2004
LIDO DI JESOLO - Ristorante Al Granso - Del colore e l'alchimia - personale
LIDO DI JESOLO - Esposizione permanente presso La Galleria/Hotel Nember & Garden
JESOLO - Casa Bianca al Mare - Gruppo Settima Porta - collettiva
MILANO - Web Art Magazine - Naturalismo astratto - personale
CATANIA - Tribe Gallery - personale
FERRARA - Sekanina Art Gallery - Colors Inside - collettiva di quattro artisti
TREVISO - Real Bar - Del colore e l'alchimia - personale
MONS (Belgio) - La Galerie du Dragon - De Botte ?Botte 3 - mostra sotto l'Alto patrocinio del Vice Consolato d'Italia - collettiva (minipersonale)
VENEZIA - Spazio Aperto - Gruppo Settima Porta - collettiva
2005
TREVISO - Interno 7 / Galleria Bailo - Accolgo la natura, nel bene o nel male - personale
VENEZIA - Antica Osteria Ruga Rialto - personale
LIDO DI JESOLO - Esposizione permanente presso La Galleria/Hotel Nember & Garden
LIDO DI JESOLO - Orange Caf?- Colors Inside - collettiva di tre artisti
ACQUASPARTA (TR) - Palazzo Cesi - Grande Mostra Internazionale nell'ambito del progetto Antichi Palazzi - collettiva
HORICE (Repubblica Ceca) - Galerie Plastik - Del colore e l'alchimia - personale
JESOLO - Sand/Hotel Acapulco Beach - Gruppo Settima Porta - collettiva
VENEZIA - Osteria alla Rivetta - Porta d'Oriente - Collettiva
JESOLO - Park Hotel Brasilia - Locus Animae, rassegna d'arte contemporanea
VENEZIA - Osteria Da Baffo - Porta D'Oriente - grande collettiva
VILANOVA Y LA GELTRU - BARCELONA (Spagna) - Arte Italia, rassegna d'arte contemporanea
MONFALCONE (GO) - De Pellegrin - personale
TREVISO - Interno 7 / Galleria Bailo - Stefano Moment? le cose che divengono - personale
MILANO - Hype Gallery - collettiva (08-27.11.2005)
2006
ORMELLE (TV) - Al Traghetto - Del colore e l'alchimia - personale
TREVISO - Libreria Moma - Coincidenze Parallele - personale
AMSTERDAM (Olanda) - Hype Gallery - collettiva (08-27.04.2006)
BARLETTA (BA) - Centro Culturale Zerouno - Generazioni - collettiva (21.04-05.05.2006)
VELDEN (Austria) - Galerie der Volksbank Velden - collettiva (28.04-18.05.2006)
LIDO DI JESOLO - Esposizione permanente presso La Galleria/Hotel Nember & Garden
FERLACH (Austria) - Castello di Ferlach - collettiva (18-28.05.2006)
JESOLO - Park Hotel Brasilia - Locus Animae, rassegna d'arte contemporanea
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