(Vimercate/Monza 1935–2013)
Bianco, 1975, signed and dated Bonalumi 75 on the reverse, with dedicatory inscription of the artist, vinyl tempera on shaped canvas, 100 x 100 cm, framed, (AR)

Watch Video: Contemporary Art | November 2015 | Italian Contemporary Art

The present work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Agostino Bonalumi Work, curated by Fabrizio Bonalumi and Marco Meneguzzo. It will also be published in the section dedicated to the colour illustrated works (vol. I, p. 233 with colour ill. and vol. II with b/w ill.)

Photo certificate:
Archivio Bonalumi, Milan, archive no. 75–024

Provenance:
Studio f.22 modern art gallery, Palazzolo sull’Oglio, Brescia (label and stamp on the reverse)
Ugo de Clemente Collection, Brescia
European Private Collection

Exhibition:
Studio f.22 modern art gallery, Palazzolo sull’Oglio, Brescia, December 1975 – January 1976

“My works are not coloured forms, but forms that emerge from colours, that is to say from light”
(Agostino Bonalumi)

Although it is not attributable to other contemporary groups or trends, Bonalumi’s work emerged from a need he shared with the most representative artists of his time. As Bonalumi said, “within the horizon of our interests were materials rather than matter, design rather than signs, action rather then gestures, sociality rather than existentialism.” Bonalumi’s artistic career stretched over a period of fifty years and was marked but constant experimentation, consistency with his expressive choice and a strict adherence to objectual art. His canvases are object-paintings, the aim of which is to go beyond the limits of the picture and occupy the surrounding space: they are three-dimensional bodies that break the surface of the canvas, invading the third dimension.
Executed in 1975, the present “Bianco” is an elegant, special example of Agostino Bonalumi’s output. With its vertically arranged centrings, it is a rarity, an element of novelty and experiment within the artist’s exploration of the world of extroflexions. Bonalumi created only six works that are typologically similar to the present one.
This one is characterised by a sculpture-like surface that is also extremely dynamic and vibrating: the effects created by light make it lively and pulsating. The undulating effect produced by the interplay of colour, light and form animates the white monochromy, and the canvas is pervaded, as it were, by waves of extraordinary naturalness and levity.
The position of the centrings, the margins of which ideally continue in the form of thin and delicate pencil marks, changes the viewer’s perception by inevitably drawing his attention to the ambiguous undulating movement of the surface.
Doubt and perceptive ambiguity constitute a constant element in Bonalumi’s artistic investigation. “However, a work of art”, he wrote, “will be all the more meaningful if, during the process of organising itself and becoming an orderly investigation, it also succeeds in accumulating doubts.”
In the present work, the artist succeeds in making the aforementioned tenet of his poetics more explicit than even before.