The MAR - Museum of Art of the city of Ravenna from March 1 to May 3, 2026, proposes the latest event of a large project - curated by Claudio Spadoni and promoted by the Mattia Association - which connects five important museums in Romagna in the celebration of the work of one of the most important Italian painters of the 20th century, Mattia Moreni (1920-1999), a native of Pavia, trained in Turin, but who, after long stays in Paris, linked his name to the Romagna region where he lived from the '70s onwards.

After the exhibitions in Bagnacavallo, Forlì, Santa Sofia, and Bologna - which investigated particular themes such as training and the informal period, some historical series, from Angurie to Self-portraits, up to the reconstruction of the Bolognese anthology curated in 1965 by Arcangeli, an exhibition dedicated to the production of the last 20 years of the master's life is inaugurated in Ravenna.

The series of the Regression of the Species and Humanoids represent the latest developments in the research of one of the most original and restless figures of Italian art in the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition at MAR - curated by Serena Simoni - gathers about thirty large works divided into two sections to illustrate the production from the early 1980s to 1999, the year of Moreni's passing. It is followed by a third section that presents a rich photographic and documentary apparatus to show the interest that numerous Italian and international critics have dedicated to the different periods of his work.

After concluding the famous cycle of Angurie in the mid-1970s, Moreni focuses on writing: between 1975 and the following decade, he writes Fluid Ignorance and Rational Absurdity because necessary, texts in which reflections on the causes of what he defines as the "regression" of the species converge. Closely linked to these writings, the last two cycles of Moreni's artistic activity are born. 

In the first section - the Regression of the Species and Fine Arts (1983-1995) - the works are exhibited in which Moreni bears witness to the involution of Fine Arts, mirroring human decline. Moreni notes how since the beginning of the 20th century, art has extinguished creative capacity by engaging in the elaboration of primitivist forms or dedicating itself to sterile formalisms. This decadent or conscious regression is exemplified in objects or undisciplined geometries that tell the stages of an aestheticizing, childish, mannered, or consumerist art. To clarify the process of this production "of nursery schools and pathological nurseries," Moreni emphasizes the infantile and psychiatric production of Art Brut: the deliberately regressive, pathological style is the flip side of a time adrift, anesthetized by mass media and mass consumerism.