Preface of Geno Pampaloni

Giuseppe Morrocchi's "visual poetry" has this distinguishing feature: that the "visual" part of it does not eat up poetry.

Of what is referred to as "visual poetry" as practised in these last years by neoavantgardists, it does not have the violence of gesture, the intellectual anger and, fundamentally, denial as primary linguistic category. It does not aim at an ambitious target, such as palingenesis and founding again a new language; more modestly, and at the same time more concretely, it moves along a critical plane, more ironic than desecrating, more circumventing than aggressive. What are its qualities?

First of all its craftsmanlike quality which does non conceal an even provincial patience, an innocent, fresh and youthful play, devoid as it is of that dimness and that menacing distilled by the retorts of many of his colleagues. In Morrocchi's visual poetry, the taste for composition, for mosaic, seems to prevail on ideological passion.

Secondly, this is basically an operation of linguistic disassembling more than a proposition, a disassembling carried out on the stereotypes of everday language and unusually inspired both by wickedness and by cheerfulness. The collage of press clippings appears, so to say, as the "shape" of this way of expression: the real "content", on the contrary, being conveyed by the individual stereotypes, taken apart, isolated, and almost returned, naked, to their responsability as insignificance, or ambiguity, or emptiness, or mystification. The result is not a pompous invitation to revolt but, more subtly, a mockery, a pillorying. Finally, the inspiring motif of Morrocchi appears to be irony which is a mode of expression never devoid of a certain amount of "connivance with the enemy". This irony is more amused than biting, more nourished of the sense of limits than of the sense of ends. Were I not afraid to cause an irreparable damage to young Morrocchi, I would say that in the landscape of visual poetry he represents the crepuscolar time, at last in the sense of self-irony and understatement.

These cartoons, with their quiet, musical and yet snaring nonsense, appear to me like the uncertain frozen surface of a lake when the spring thaw approaches: there, each step of one walking could be the last one, as ice visibly does not hold. But we immediately realize that the imprudent person facing that danger is each one of us, since we all are compelled to identify ourselves, with a flush of shame, in that linguistic irresponsability so charmingly witnessed by Morrocchi.

Hence something daredevilish and playful, but at the same time admonitory, attracts and perturbs in front of these compositions. Morrocchi does not claim to teach any lesson: but be careful, as be warns us, like in Pascarella's line, "we all belong to history".

From the catalogue presentation of a exhibition held at Florence, from 11th April to 10th May, 1972.