CESARE VIVALDI, poet, critic and director of the "Accademia di Belle Arti" di Roma writes in 1993:

Between 1979 and 1981, I lived for periods of months at a time at Calcata, where Costantino Morosin turned up in 1979.

Bursting with vitality, Costantino did little else during that period except tirelessly explore the area around Calcata on the saddle of a lilliputian motorcycle, which contrasted with his genial bulk, seeking the soul of a countryside which could be described as the very essence of the tuff of which it is formed. This tuff was to become Costantino's preferred material.

For the rest of the time he was busy with design, and began to interest himself in the relationship between art and tecnology, between oil-painting and the creation of fluid images on the computer. This occupied him almost exclusively from 1982 to 1986.
Until that point, he seemed to have achieved little in his life; but in fact he was identifying more and more closely with local history and anthropology. He was developing his inner poetic and creative drives in a manner which was not evident in his desk studies or his work so much as in a visual, olfactory and tactile concern with the relationship between man and the land.

Through the realisation of this identity, the contradictions in the artistic life of Costantino Morosin were resolved - on the one hand his aesthetic attitudes, and on the other the desire to make a social impact, along with a passion for human life and cultural anthropology. He put aside, for the time being, malters of advanced technology and its artistic applications, though this is not to say that il will be for good.

Since 1986, Morosin has been concerned solely with giving form to the tuff with which he so closely identified. At first, he did this diffidently, almost camouflaging the true sculpture with conceptual art; but gradually he allowed his talent for shape to emerge in the creation of forms that were sometimes elemental and archetypical, sometimes richly developed and complex. For two years, from 1986 to 1988, Costantino sculpted eggs, large and small, some of which he buried in various corners of Calcata, in the places where he had made them.

At the same time, he conceived and executed some large "thrones", intended for the gods of Calcata to rest in.

But this is to justify in words a kind of sculpture which in fact justifies itself by reviving the archetypal egg-form with all its connotations in life and mythology and its pervasive shape. The recreation of a practical object - the throne - emphasises its sacred value through a concentration on basic, roughly finished physical form.

In the last five years, Costantino has emerged from the cocoon of conceptual art and has revealed his bursting talent for sculpture in a brief process of stylisation; but there is nothing "puppet-like" about this. He has drawn his models from the early nineteenth century among them Cambellotti and Arturo Martini. From such models, it is easy to took forward to Moore or perhaps to the forms of Haring, or, viceversa, to look back to Brancusi and so ever further back, as far as the cycladic idols and, of course, those of the Etruscans.
It is these latter forms which recall to our attention the tuff (and the peperino and terracotta and even bronzo) of Costantino.

And so, it seems, we have come full circle, starting and finishing with the tuff and the countryside round Calcata. But this is not a closed circle; rather, it is a spiral movement which is proceeding with ever greater authority. Between the tuff which Costantino discovered and identified with, several years ago, and the tuff which today he forcefully carves into exact shapes, there is the wide gulf that exists between theory and fact, between possibility and certainty.

Costantino's considerable sculptural power, then only a potential, albeit fully conceived, is now a continuously developing reality, from which we may rightly expect unforeseen surprises - though we may be sure they will be pleasant ones.

Costantino's talent, which has now reached new heights with the "Horses", so perceptively discussed by Paolo Portoghesi, is in full flight.

His stylised primitivism not all that far removed from that of Pietro Cascella, (but fundamentally different) may express itself in further diverse, complex and rich variations; but it cannot change its precisely defined connotations.

And Costantino must not neglect his unusual decorative outlook, clearly evident in his paintings, but even more inte-resting in those sculptures, which obviousiy cannol be exhi-bited, "integrated" with particular places or which form door lintels, stairheads, furniture, pilasters, columns and so forth.

This Viterbo exhibition will surely be the first step on the road to national recognition for Costantino Morosin's sculpture.

Considering the copious richness of his talent, I have no doubt at all as to his future public recognition.

CESARE VIVALDI