There was no better occasion to celebrate the centenary of his birthIt will be in 2025, than to set up the exhibition that can be visited until 16 February 2025, in the Licini House Museum in Monte Vidon Corrado to remember and even more investigate the work
by Magdalo Mussio (Volterra, 1925 – Civitanova Marche, 2006), one of the most significant exponents of verbal-visual experimentation, capable of developing his own stylistic signature, precious, intellectually cultured and a sign of incisive avant-garde. His work, although falling within the large framework of visual poetry that appeared in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s in several centers (Rome, Milan, Florence, Genoa and Turin), stands out from it, making room for it in verbo-visual languages. Mussio does not reduce the layout of his works and compositions to rigid and geometric schemes, he uses mass media images lightly, captured to be used in collage, without ever alluding to political commitment as was the case for example with Miccini and Pignotti; he does not pursue the elimination of the typical expression of conceptual art. And over the years it has lived through the age of the neo-avant-garde of the second half of the twentieth century, intersecting artistic research, word, image, linguistics and semiotics, also recovering experiences from the beginning of the twentieth century – and even earlier ones – just think of the futurists to propose the word, the alphabetical letter and number. Marinetti’s movement and free words influenced the works of the early modernists, Max Weber, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, James Daugherty, etc. until the 1913 Armory Show in New York and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.
The graphic character, the gesture and the action of writing, the characters, the sign recur in all the sets
areas in which Mussio worked (graphics, drawing, publishing, painting, animation); but the primary origin of this scriptural impulse of his must be sought in his notes, in that jumble of sketches, writings, scribbles, drawings, traces of movements, indications.
Try to immerse yourself in his tables, in his works characterized by illegible handwriting, often hermetic as if they were intended for divinatory priests. They are traces of psychic energies, writings lost on the page, flows of consciousness and automatisms, uncontrollable germinations of a private handwriting, minute to the point of indecipherability, accompanied by erasures that leave a memory of what has been; they are tangles of lines and sequences of numbers, rare touches of the heart, eccentric vectors of thread-like signs, for a multi-directional spatiality of the sign. Everything is suspended on the white page, in the void of a clean surface marked at the top or bottom, on the right or left as if it needed to be filled, and with subsequent switching on and superimpositions, memories of a time, stories in installments. Those of Mussio are traces of a returning origin, that of a very remote, primitive era, in which the sign still preceded the meaning of the words.
Thanks to the study of archive materials, made available by the artist’s family together with all the works on display, the exhibition investigates the dimension of the margin, of a page that contains, and does not overflow, in which the sign was at the same time image and word, one always encroaching on the other, without a margin, in fact. A real threshold between the real and Elsewhere was the margin, one do it all –I would like to add – between the real and the mental, along which Mussio felt contradictory omens, suspended between a pressing anxiety 
of existence and sudden hopes of redemption, aware of the inevitability of pain and evil as well as the need to accept it. The perception of degradation, destruction, cancellation that emanates from his works is a harbinger, however, of a truth, that along the margin, everything that disappears is always confused with what is about to appear and return to being. Traces, silent stories, hermetic words hanging from a sign, all in the silence of waiting and yet all wrapped up in that climate of human and poetic experience as it already was for Osvaldo Licini, given that the exhibition is gathered here in Monte Vidon Corrado. Magdalo Mussio also left traces of this, everything relates to his having been a discreet man and artist, to his opening his heart and mind to link the ancient and the present, and to let the ancestral knowledge of the world emerge, as he thoroughly dictated his research.
Carlo Franza