Agostino Bonalumi ^©  

(1935 - 2013)

Provenance:
Private collection, Milan

Artwork registered in the Bonalumi Archive by Fabrizio Bonalumi, Milan, with number 68-030 as per certificate

Blindarte kindly thanks to Valeria Caimi, of the Bonalumi Archive, Milan, for the help in compiling this sheet

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Agostino Bonalumi (Vimercate 1935 - Desio, 2013) was a prominent exponent of a conception of art as a tactile experience between painting and sculpture. He inspired the Italian artistic scene, directing his research towards overcoming the Informal. The works and experiments of the beginnings lead, starting from the 60s, into a type of language capable of involving the third dimension through the extroversions of the canvas, which constitute the most known stylistic feature of the artist.

Just in these years, the most important for the artistic production of Bonalumi, is the extroverted cire of 1968 entitled "Rosso" here proposed. The work, a perfect synthesis between painting and sculpture, presents two perfect symmetrical "pance" on the sides of the canvas. These innovate in an excellent way the artistic production of the time, activating a new and unprecedented relationship between the work, its surfaces and space emphasizing the conception of the painting as a physical object and perfect fusion between painting and sculpture, that the critic Gillo Dorfles defined "Pitture-Oggetto". A vibrant play of chiaroscuro obtained without changing the color and modulating instead the structure on which it is lying.

During an interview the artist said: "Introflexion and extroversion are inevitable terms in the description of my work, if they indicate the action of opposing forces acting on the surface, bringing it to tension. Any work shaped by clay or shaped by marble can be structured in such a way as to present projections and recesses, but in the case of appearance (the quality, the nature of the form, therefore the image) will never offer the perception a value of tension; the re-entry of the surface does not suggest to the intuition a space inside the work; it is path rather than movement that gives complexity to the appearance: the eye runs through the shell or surface or shape".