Pier Giulio Bonifacio
– Critical Notes
Pier Giulio
Bonifacio's long experience of the void as a mental condition and as a space
for events which are minimalist on the plane of representation but momentous on
that of emotion, enables him now to re-appropriate expression through colour. At
this stage in his long investigation into abstraction, the linguistic
radicality of his work is no longer reduced to the monotone values of grey but
grapples resolutely with the relational complexity of the colour spectrum.
------
Even
in the absence of naturalistic reference, the artist cannot elude the retinal
and aesthetic stimuli generated by the change in environment. Even a simple
change of studio can modify, not only internally, sensations and reasons for
working. In musical terms, his monotone register has become polyphonic. We no
longer listen to a single voice speaking but to a choral sonority; there is no
longer a single plane which defines the compositional structure but rather a
stratigraphy of levels. His last formal structures, still marked by a
declension of grey tones, in some respects already foreshadowed the need to
organize rather than modulate the planes of the painting, Prisms and sharp
edges have now taken space away from the rough and troubled edges of the
painting, just as rich, sun-filled vision has placed at a distance the
"Nordic climate" of the composition.
------
These
borderline geometries, between form and non-form, colour and non-colour,
totality and fragment, single plane and virtual three-dimensionality, have
acquired a complexity which is less disturbing on the plane of consciousness
and more resonant on the plane of harmony.
Viana
Conti
(translated
by Ian Harvey)
At
the beginning of the 50s the Italian painting scene, split as it
was into various groups each adhering to a different poetics, offered a great
variety of options in the non-figurative mode alone (an approach which as a
whole met with the strong opposition of the neo-realists with their ideological
emphasis on content). At times these options were tried out in a spirit of still
ingenuous enthusiasm (as can be seen in the post-cubist abstraction originally
practised by the young Romans of "Forma 1" or in the informal
explosion of the Milanese "nucleari"); at other times, however, they
were adopted with schema tic rigour, as by the neo-concrete artists who were
members of M.A.C. They were either practised with the impulse of an immediately
acquired maturity (as can he seen in Burri's highly palpable works) or
accompanied by the aspiration - advocated by Fontana and the "Spazialisti"-
to trascend the limits of the painting. It was in this context - one that he
got to know directly as a result of his contact with both the art scenes of
Turin and Milan (also because of his architectural studies) and the
cosmopolitan melting pot of Albisola - that Pier Giulio Bonifacio approached
the practical business of painting.
------
It is
easy to see how the reflective and, one could almost say,
organizational
implications which make painting, in Bonifacio's words, "an instrument of
thought", are not merely the result of a cold calculation of values and
interaction of forms.
Behind
the "severity of the image" pointed out by Angelo Savelli there is in
fact an acute sensibility for the germinal component of the sign.
------
Thus
in Bonifacio's work order does not present itself as a deduction from an a
priori proposition but as a humpy and interminable process.
------
Bearing
witness to this inclination of his the asymmetry' and persistent rejection of
rectangularity (there is evidence of this even in his minimalist orientated
pieces - large monochrome outlines, with geometrically oblique, shapes -
produced between 1980 and 1981); it can even be seen in his more restrained
recent works, where there is a radical reduction of the range of colours, limited
to greys and blacks, whites and reds, and where the application of colour is in
places rarefied, showing up, in line with a carefully controlled use of the
accidental, the vibration of the background. Or, again, there is the
imperceptible irregularity, the slight extending beyond the margins of some
linear elements, defined by blocking out the surrounding space; this method of
placing in order to take away in a certain way allows the artist to
"construct a void in painting" (Conti).
------
Fissures,
wedges, broken lines (those hooks one often comes across in his paintings) are
elevated to the status of emblems, reflecting in their elementary geometric
presence the figure of a subtle join between soul and precision, between the
universal and the particular.
Sandro
Ricaldone
(translated
by Ian Harvey)
The attempt to
define a margin, a threshold that can on the one hand present itself as a rich
and meaningful figure and on the other function as a matrix, a formative
architectural sign - this seems to be the thread that runs through Pier Giulio
Bonifacio's "pages", a series of notes that build up gradually ...
------
Bonifacio does not
paint figures on an empty, lifeless ground; his drawing of fragments - at times
playing with a two-dimensional effect, at times (in his more recent works)
capable of alluding to ambiguous perspectives and certain empty and full
volumes, to overhangs and withdrawals, to perceptually ambiguous projections -
is determined by the manipulation of a pictorial surface that is always on the
move, constantly inquisitive and called into question in its most elementary
forms.
------
Highlighting
casualty created figures, making them leading players, saving them from any
possible fate as mere extras - this seems to be one of the expressive sites
which Bonifacio visits.
------
If in
the eighties and early nineties his work was characterised by monochromatic
shades of grey constantly contradicted by the appearance of traces, underlying
chromatic shadows that dominated the basic surface from which emerged figural
strips of flesh, now the surface can be
structured using different pigments to accentuate the dialectic between
the fundamental elements of the creation of images - and this is the dialogue
that I have tried to interpret amidst the folds of his work.
Alberto
Veca
(translated
by Ian Harvey)
Pier
Giulio
Bonifacio's current works - which follow on from those produced in the period from 1953 co 1986 and published
in the monograph together with texts by
Viana Conti and Marco Meneguzzo - are intimations that the massive bombardment of serial rhythms to which our
perceptual faculties are exposed
neither excludes nor prevents the simple psychological processes of
spatio-temporal development, the
accumulation of experience or the search for qualitative rather than quantitative values.
------
Now, however, the artist has started to split the
surface into two levels: the plane of the known and the plane of the unknown.
He explores the possibility of the co-existence of two zones; one calm and
soft, the other fluid and tense. In other words, what he is doing is making a
proposal of formal totality. The underlying thought, however, is still that of
reconciling two eternal principles: the shared level and emergence, or, in other words, being and existence.
------
In their progression through space each of
these "drawn" or "traced" forms reiterates the rhythms of a
"tale" which speaks of man's interior dimension, that
world of impulses and sediments that
lie at the very heart of us all: in sum, the sharp stimulus to find in art the
precise transcription of a mental act.
------
The surface events are forms, but also sounds; one
is aware of an openness on the pan of the artist not only to chance external
sounds, hit also to those sounds that are sediments left by constant exposure
to "serious music" The sound-sign is an event, it is an
"aletheia" (truth).
------
In
the last works the void becomes the initial setting for each new enterprise,
that is, "the
world
that ought to he", or to put it another way, the great ethical-aesthetic
link which has yet to come into being. But the void is also the enigma which
interposes itself in the communication between individuals. Bonifacio's work
makes us"feel" that mysterious residue which lies between the sum
total of our existence and our reason.
Marisa
Vescovo
(translated by lan
Harvey)
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