Messina's imagination, lirically obsessed by violence, reaches some moments of real originality, and one cloud say that sometimes his imagination even go ahead of his pictorial realisation. Not casually, do his finest paintings show images where the alarmed message of violence is expressed through the conflict or the mere still connection between the organic and machine-like metallic representations. All his paintings showing knives got into the ground give a surrealistic image of a new type, so much more appreciable as it appears apart from the surrealistic "kitchen" so largely experienced by these new pictures.

Dario Micacchi L'Unità (1973)

For Messina, this added reality is not anymore a harrowing bestiary begotten in the sleep of reason, on an eight day of the Creation. By declaring their unreality, these teratological hallucinations sapped their own power. They were notions, not emtoions. Concepts, not percepts. Now, Messina remains within the realm of the real: the overdose of reality is injected through a hypnotic calligraphy. What is painted acquires a new meaning through the way in hich it is painted. Exactitude breeds nightmares. Isolation conceives desolation. All vital allusions are drained from the unnatural hardness of natural things. "La vraie vie est absente" from this "heap of broken images" at lwo tide, "when there is no water"; Rimbaud meets Eliot in Messina's "Waste Land" which is also his private "Season in Hell": Nature Denaturans.

Pierre Rouve excerpts from catalogue Bedford House Gallery (1976)