Vittorio Messina was born in Zafferana Etnea (Catania) in 1946. He completed his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Architecture in Rome, the city where he lives and works and where, at the end of the 1970s, he made his debut in the Sant'Agata dei Goti space - a meeting point and place of experimentation for young art in those years - with ‘La Muraglia Cinese’, an exhibition structured around the Kafkaesque text of the same name.

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Already with ‘The Wall’ and with the exhibitions at the ‘La Salita’ gallery in Rome (1982), and at the Locus Solus gallery in Genoa (1983), Messina's work is oriented towards a form of environmental sculpture where the use of organic and natural materials gradually disappears. Thus, passing through exhibitions at the Minini gallery in Brescia (with Garutti in 1985), at the PAC in Milan, at the exhibition ‘Il Cangiante’ curated by Corrado Levi (1986), Messina exhibited his first ‘cells’ at the Moltkerei Werkstatt in Cologne and at the Shimada gallery in Yamaguchi (Japan), real buildings constructed with serial building materials, usually self-illuminated with industrial lamps.

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In his research, the artist has repeatedly elaborated this iconography as a unit of reference, synonymous with the ‘room’, a basic element of architecture and especially of urban construction. Since the mid-1980s Messina, using its materials and modes, has highlighted the ‘abuse’ consumed by art in relation to the degradation and environmental and social issues taking place in the metropolitan suburbs.

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In 1987, at Palazzo Taverna in Rome (Incontri Internazionali d'Arte), as part of a cycle in which Maria Nordman, Bruce Naumann and Luca Maria Patella presented their work, Messina built a ‘cell’ and published a text, ‘Paesaggio con luce lontana’ (Landscape with Distant Light), in which the Heisenbergian theme of indeterminacy emerged, which was already present in the exhibition ‘Spostamenti sulla banda del rosso’ (Moving on the Red Band) at Villa Romana (Florence 1985). From this moment on, Messina's work unfolds with stringent visionary continuity in the large ‘Krater’ exhibited at the ‘Europa Oggi’ show at the Pecci Museum in Prato (1988), in the total installation at the Oddi Baglioni Gallery in Rome in the same year, up to the ‘Aetatis suae’ show at the Tucci Russo Gallery in Turin (1990), where an out-of-tune television screen acts as a counterpoint to a series of five large niches, which carry out the theme of nominations with a sort of ‘plastic writing’.

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Subsequently, from the ‘cell’ of the Minini Gallery, Brescia (1991), to that of the Kunstverein in Kassel (1991) and the Victoria Miro Gallery (London 1992), as well as the ‘Room for Heisenberg’ (night work for Edicola Notte, Rome 1991), as in the 24 windows of the exhibition ‘Lux Europae’ in Edinburgh (1992), up to the works in the Castello di Girifalco, Cortona (with Thomas Schütte, 1993), Messina's work is configured with the unpredictability and disenchantment of a veritable metaphysical building site. This is an idea that has been developing since the 1990s, in the exhibitions at the Kunstverein in Düsseldorf, Villa delle Rose, Bologna, the National Galerie in Berlin, the Erfurt Museum, the Leeds Museum, up to the large installations in the ‘Dialogues’ (Maschio Angioino and Castel dell'Ovo, Naples, 2002), integrating a form of mobility and radical precariousness, with the image of the city as an improper and artificial organism. In the exhibition ‘A village and its surroundings’ (H. Moore Foundation, Halifax 1999) some installations include the use of film-video in the perspective of ‘tableau vivant’, of ‘signalling’ and ‘control’. In ‘The Discretion of Time 1’ (Ujazdovki Museum, Warsaw, 2002), and in ‘A Visible City’, (Modena, 2004), and then again in ‘Chronographies, or the Vertical City’ (Cavallerizza Reale, Turin, 2006), and in ‘Momentanea Mens’, (DKM Foundation, Duisburg 2009), the space-time of the human habitat tends to expand even further, up to the extreme dilatation of ‘Hermes’, a work lasting 72 hours, divided into 9 ‘Chapters’, born from the elaboration of a 42-minute 8 mm film from 1970 (Insel Hombroich, 1970/2008). Finally, in the exhibition at the Galleria Guidi in (Rome, 2011), as in the works at the MACRO (‘Eighties are Back’, Rome 2011) and in the exhibition with Thomas Schütte at the Villa Massimo (Rome 2011), Messina reinforces the tautological component of his work and initiates a new reflection on the forces and dimensions of real space.

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In 2013, Messina, at the Museum of the Ancient Aurelian Walls in Rome, again confronts himself with an environment strongly marked by history and events, as in the two major exhibitions in 2014, at the MACRO in Rome and at the Kunsthalle in Göppingen, on the theme of ‘Postbabel and surroundings’, where the subject of the city re-emerges as a reflection on the origin of language and of the very form of art as a tension and cultural bearer of the human community, the same that in ‘Teatro Naturale, Prove in Connecticut’ (2016), the exhibition at the ‘Regio Albergo delle Povere’ Museo Riso in Palermo, is an absent protagonist of the new ‘Habitat’ in Messina. Absent or forgetful protagonists, perhaps, in front of the ruins that history tirelessly accumulates in front of the astonished gaze of the Angelus Novus, in the same place where they are called for a ‘Convivio’ at 271 Höherweg (2018), in elegant Düsseldorf, the same place where Messina set up the scorching atmosphere of the returning, eternal ‘Red Shift’; and it is through the constant, radical innovation of his lexicon that the artist goes on to specify a discontinuous conception of space-time and, therefore, of history as an infinite, senseless accumulation of experience - certainly, of individual experience -, which in art is translated as the correspondent of an interiority that is largely inaccessible, except by generous attempts.

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