Arturo Bonfanti
Bergamo, 1905 - 1978
From 1950 onwards, from the artistic production of Arturo Bonfanti, disappears every trace of evocation of the object and comes to maturity a language that definitively abandons any link with figuration: lines, shapes and colors are the protagonists of a universe of abstract ideality, of places of the mind known only by the artist.
Arturo Bonfanti was born in Bergamo on 24 May 1905. He attended the Andrea Fantoni Art School where he became friends with the painter Angiolo Alebardi, of whom he became a private student after leaving school. From this last Bonfanti deduced the first rudiments of formal and chromatic synthesis, while still remaining within certain figurative schemes.
After serving in Florence, in 1926 he moved to Milan, where he continued designing interiors and as a graphic designer for publishing. The paintings of those years show signs of a need for clarification and simplification of forms, a need that will be followed later in a more decisive formulation. In particular, a painting ("Untitled") of 1927 - a nocturnal depicting a house and a hieratic figure facing the balcony - shows how the influence of Italian Primitives' painting is already heavily impregnated with a geometrizing taste, then further elaborated in contact with the abstract tendencies that, in the thirties, are coagulated around the Galleria del Milione. Until then, in fact, the artist works in a dimension of secret, personal and constant dialogue with the great tradition of Italian painting. Piero della Francesca, L. Laurana and F. by Giorgio Martini together with the master painters of the so-called ideal cities of the Urbino Renaissance are clear and continuous sources of inspiration; the learning of their lesson in works such as a small oil on cardboard ("Untitled") of 1939 where the dizzying perspective cannot but refer to those icy and crystalline visions fifteenth.
However, in those years, also thanks to his frequent visits, Bonfanti matures a certain awareness of what is happening within the Italian avant-garde. Without adhering to any current and without siding with any faction, he looks carefully at the works exhibited at the gallery of Peppino Ghiringhelli in Brera, facing the same formal problems that engage his colleagues in the field of geometric abstraction and concrete art.
At the end of the 1930s Bonfanti’s work was still influenced by Morandi’s Metaphysics, as shown by the still life paintings painted in 1939: here the object, still evoked in the clear legibility of the forms, it already becomes pure volume accentuated by a richly abstract chromatic value. In fact, works such as Paper Talks (1939) and Abstraction 9 (1940), already mark the entry of Bonfanti into the bed of Abstractionism, even if, at least until the mid-forties, the reference to figures and objects, does not completely disappear from the artist’s works. Indeed, this reference provides Bonfanti with the opportunity to use geometry as a tool of simplification to design that refined game of linear intersections that will then be the hallmark of his style. The works up to 1946 show the tendency to divide the space of the canvas into areas delimited by slightly oblique trajectories and curvilinear partitions, according to a compositional scheme of the collage. Bonfanti insists on the juxtaposition of chromatic zones and, at the same time, veers his palette towards an increasingly reduced range of colors, relying on effects of tonal variation built for veils.
The '20s-'30s were also the years of his first solo exhibition in his hometown (1927), of his marriage to Luisa Ferravilla, daughter of the famous actor, and of the birth of little Adriana.
From 1946 onward, there were frequent trips abroad: to Paris he befriended A. Magnelli, G. Schneider, S. Charchoune, H. Arp; to Zurich with M. Bill; to Munich with W. Baumeister, G. Fruhtrunk and to London with B. Nicholson and V. Pasmore. These important visits naturally contribute to the development of his artistic consciousness and his entry into the field of Concrete Art.
From 1950 onwards, in fact, every trace of evocation of the object disappears from his production and a language comes to maturity that definitively abandons any link with figuration: lines, shapes and colors are the protagonists of a universe of abstract ideality, of places of the mind known only by the artist.
He returned to Milan around 1952, taking an active interest in film experiences by making short films that he presented at the XVIII Cannes Amateur Festival where he obtained in 1954 with La chiave di Calandrino the Prix du Film de Marionettes. Sergio Liberovici’s Panchina at the Donizetti theatre in Bergamo in 1956. In 1959 he set up after fourteen years of silence his second solo exhibition in Bergamo at the Lorenzelli Gallery: the artist now works on the definition of a vocabulary composed of essential forms, and at the same time prefigure the full linguistic maturity of the following decades. The works from the second half of the fifties to the early seventies show how his painting is spreading more and more in a dialogue of intersecting planes, which slide on each other, in which the geometry of the forms becomes more and more sharp, in an underlying allusion, by now completely idealized, to the orderly scores of the painting of the masters of the Renaissance perspective.
The pictorial fields, increasingly articulated, the forms, increasingly marked by severe linear partitions, as well as the relationships between the various areas of the surface, now subsist in a sort of balanced contrast between opposing forces and opposing forces. Perimeters and edges delimit a pictorial field in which geometric shapes tend to converge towards the center of the surface, which is a visual focus often marked by the presence of a letter or a number. They serve to settle the entire composition, meticulously arranged in positions of strategic balance, without their precious presence there is almost the impression that Bonfanti’s work can collapse into a confused and incomprehensible juxtaposition of planes and surfaces. Letters and numbers become powerful gravitational attractors, have the effect of magnetizing the entire space of the composition and at the same time also act as a visual focus of the image.
It is a device that Bonfanti also applies to paintings in which there are no letters, numbers or other signs typical of his grammar, and that is expressed in the search for a formal order, but never completely symmetrical. A setup that is, rather, based on a strong structural tension capable of generating a range of surprising and unexpected static balances.
In Composition 146 (1963), for example, the static equilibrium is produced by the very refined chromatic progression of the central band, which horizontally cuts the surface of the canvas into two unequal zones, yet equivalent Bonfanti is, After all, even a very fine colorist, an extraordinary inventor of elegant color ranges, built around tonal and tonal variations of exquisitely musical taste. Notes and chords of rare elegance and unusual rhythmic rhythms characterize, in fact, his original visual vocabulary, aimed at sounding the imagination of abstract ideality.
As Luigi Carluccio noted in 1977, the musical rhythm is one of the main themes of Bonfanti’s work, always animated by "a rhythm without burrs, without reverberations, rooted in sharp contours, drawn as a series of signals on a wall: a series made in equal measure of categorical precision and fluid suggestions". But what’s more, Bonfanti’s painting is also pervaded by a subtle, persistent emotional vibration and an accent that is both ironic and affectionate. A painting, in short, that, to be understood, requires the attention of a fine sensitivity, prepared to grasp in its mobile geometries and in the contrast of shapes and planes, of lights and colors, both the changing and changing mystery of existence, as that, very human, incessant tension towards a condition of rediscovered balance and imperturbable harmony.
Museums:
Bergamo, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
Locarno, Pinacoteca Casa Rusca
Bibliography:
Arturo Bonfanti, catalogo della mostra a cura della Galleria Lorenzelli, Bergamo, 1959; Willy Rotzelr, Bonfanti 1905/1978, Milano, Alfieri Edizioni d’Arte, 1979
After serving in Florence, in 1926 he moved to Milan, where he continued designing interiors and as a graphic designer for publishing. The paintings of those years show signs of a need for clarification and simplification of forms, a need that will be followed later in a more decisive formulation. In particular, a painting ("Untitled") of 1927 - a nocturnal depicting a house and a hieratic figure facing the balcony - shows how the influence of Italian Primitives' painting is already heavily impregnated with a geometrizing taste, then further elaborated in contact with the abstract tendencies that, in the thirties, are coagulated around the Galleria del Milione. Until then, in fact, the artist works in a dimension of secret, personal and constant dialogue with the great tradition of Italian painting. Piero della Francesca, L. Laurana and F. by Giorgio Martini together with the master painters of the so-called ideal cities of the Urbino Renaissance are clear and continuous sources of inspiration; the learning of their lesson in works such as a small oil on cardboard ("Untitled") of 1939 where the dizzying perspective cannot but refer to those icy and crystalline visions fifteenth.
However, in those years, also thanks to his frequent visits, Bonfanti matures a certain awareness of what is happening within the Italian avant-garde. Without adhering to any current and without siding with any faction, he looks carefully at the works exhibited at the gallery of Peppino Ghiringhelli in Brera, facing the same formal problems that engage his colleagues in the field of geometric abstraction and concrete art.
At the end of the 1930s Bonfanti’s work was still influenced by Morandi’s Metaphysics, as shown by the still life paintings painted in 1939: here the object, still evoked in the clear legibility of the forms, it already becomes pure volume accentuated by a richly abstract chromatic value. In fact, works such as Paper Talks (1939) and Abstraction 9 (1940), already mark the entry of Bonfanti into the bed of Abstractionism, even if, at least until the mid-forties, the reference to figures and objects, does not completely disappear from the artist’s works. Indeed, this reference provides Bonfanti with the opportunity to use geometry as a tool of simplification to design that refined game of linear intersections that will then be the hallmark of his style. The works up to 1946 show the tendency to divide the space of the canvas into areas delimited by slightly oblique trajectories and curvilinear partitions, according to a compositional scheme of the collage. Bonfanti insists on the juxtaposition of chromatic zones and, at the same time, veers his palette towards an increasingly reduced range of colors, relying on effects of tonal variation built for veils.
The '20s-'30s were also the years of his first solo exhibition in his hometown (1927), of his marriage to Luisa Ferravilla, daughter of the famous actor, and of the birth of little Adriana.
From 1946 onward, there were frequent trips abroad: to Paris he befriended A. Magnelli, G. Schneider, S. Charchoune, H. Arp; to Zurich with M. Bill; to Munich with W. Baumeister, G. Fruhtrunk and to London with B. Nicholson and V. Pasmore. These important visits naturally contribute to the development of his artistic consciousness and his entry into the field of Concrete Art.
From 1950 onwards, in fact, every trace of evocation of the object disappears from his production and a language comes to maturity that definitively abandons any link with figuration: lines, shapes and colors are the protagonists of a universe of abstract ideality, of places of the mind known only by the artist.
He returned to Milan around 1952, taking an active interest in film experiences by making short films that he presented at the XVIII Cannes Amateur Festival where he obtained in 1954 with La chiave di Calandrino the Prix du Film de Marionettes. Sergio Liberovici’s Panchina at the Donizetti theatre in Bergamo in 1956. In 1959 he set up after fourteen years of silence his second solo exhibition in Bergamo at the Lorenzelli Gallery: the artist now works on the definition of a vocabulary composed of essential forms, and at the same time prefigure the full linguistic maturity of the following decades. The works from the second half of the fifties to the early seventies show how his painting is spreading more and more in a dialogue of intersecting planes, which slide on each other, in which the geometry of the forms becomes more and more sharp, in an underlying allusion, by now completely idealized, to the orderly scores of the painting of the masters of the Renaissance perspective.
The pictorial fields, increasingly articulated, the forms, increasingly marked by severe linear partitions, as well as the relationships between the various areas of the surface, now subsist in a sort of balanced contrast between opposing forces and opposing forces. Perimeters and edges delimit a pictorial field in which geometric shapes tend to converge towards the center of the surface, which is a visual focus often marked by the presence of a letter or a number. They serve to settle the entire composition, meticulously arranged in positions of strategic balance, without their precious presence there is almost the impression that Bonfanti’s work can collapse into a confused and incomprehensible juxtaposition of planes and surfaces. Letters and numbers become powerful gravitational attractors, have the effect of magnetizing the entire space of the composition and at the same time also act as a visual focus of the image.
It is a device that Bonfanti also applies to paintings in which there are no letters, numbers or other signs typical of his grammar, and that is expressed in the search for a formal order, but never completely symmetrical. A setup that is, rather, based on a strong structural tension capable of generating a range of surprising and unexpected static balances.
In Composition 146 (1963), for example, the static equilibrium is produced by the very refined chromatic progression of the central band, which horizontally cuts the surface of the canvas into two unequal zones, yet equivalent Bonfanti is, After all, even a very fine colorist, an extraordinary inventor of elegant color ranges, built around tonal and tonal variations of exquisitely musical taste. Notes and chords of rare elegance and unusual rhythmic rhythms characterize, in fact, his original visual vocabulary, aimed at sounding the imagination of abstract ideality.
As Luigi Carluccio noted in 1977, the musical rhythm is one of the main themes of Bonfanti’s work, always animated by "a rhythm without burrs, without reverberations, rooted in sharp contours, drawn as a series of signals on a wall: a series made in equal measure of categorical precision and fluid suggestions". But what’s more, Bonfanti’s painting is also pervaded by a subtle, persistent emotional vibration and an accent that is both ironic and affectionate. A painting, in short, that, to be understood, requires the attention of a fine sensitivity, prepared to grasp in its mobile geometries and in the contrast of shapes and planes, of lights and colors, both the changing and changing mystery of existence, as that, very human, incessant tension towards a condition of rediscovered balance and imperturbable harmony.
Museums:
Bergamo, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
Locarno, Pinacoteca Casa Rusca
Bibliography:
Arturo Bonfanti, catalogo della mostra a cura della Galleria Lorenzelli, Bergamo, 1959; Willy Rotzelr, Bonfanti 1905/1978, Milano, Alfieri Edizioni d’Arte, 1979
