ARTURO BONFANTI
Born in Bergamo (Italy) in 1905 and died in 1978, Arturo Bonfanti was an Italian painter expressing himself through geometric abstraction. He studied at the Andrea Fantoni School of Art in Bergamo from 1924 and in 1926 he moved to Milan to devote his life to graphic arts and interior design. In the 1930s, he developed ties with artists of the abstraction movement gravitating around the Galleria del Milione in Milan. He was also greatly inspired by Le Corbusier, Carlo Carrà and Amédée Ozenfant. In 1947, he began to paint abstraction that aimed to simplify forms by geometrizing them. Like few artists at that time, it will not join a very specific art current and will not be limited to the latter. In 1954, he won an Award at the Cannes Film Festival for his film 'La chiave di Calandrino'. His works will be exhibited in his own room at the Pavilion of Italy at the 34th Venice Art Biennale in 1968. Bonfanti’s works recall the terms of the declaration of intent of the founders of Concrete Art presented in the one and only issue of the magazine of the group:
Art is universal.
The work of art must be entirely conceived and formed by the mind before its execution. She must receive nothing from the formal data of nature, nor from sensuality, nor from sentimentality. We want to exclude lyricism, dramatism, symbolism, etc.
The painting must be entirely constructed with purely plastic elements, that is to say planes and colors. A pictorial element has no other meaning than “itself”.
The construction of the painting, as well as its elements, must be simple and visually controllable.
The technique must be mechanical, that is to say exact, anti-impressionist.
Effort for absolute clarity.
The artist’s works therefore state that he has no problem in conforming his art to these terms and that it is therefore possible to consider it “concrete”. Rare are his paintings of the figurative years, he also experienced drawing, figurative but with his own touch and his way of approaching reality. The “true” Bonfanti, who deserves a place in the history of European art of the 20th century, matures from the second half of the 1930s, when timidly but surely, it begins to simplify and geometrize forms. Composition becomes essential and the work itself takes on a metaphysical connotation. The artist’s career is clearly rooted in the tradition of Italian painting in its relationship with the sensitivity and sedimentation of forms. In the 1940s, instances of abstraction were exhausted in the artist, but some remained in his collages aimed at a more intuitive than scriptive reading.
Later, still in search of his artistic personality, he chose to refine the lines used to scan the elements of the compositions so that the loose figures take on a spatial value by mimicking surfaces that interact in superimposed presences. He sought the third dimension in 1959 when he created his first lacquered wood sculpture but also experimented with it in his paintings using oil paint to create and experiment with a relief. It is therefore possible to note that throughout his career, Bonfanti anticipates through certain expressions the future evolution of his art. According to Luciano Caramel; “Bonfanti introduced into his language an infinity characteristic of motifs, all melted into a dimension full of charm, enveloping, singularly cultivated which is in reality the strength of its value whose characteristic unity derives from this dimension”. Arturo Bonfanti will exhibit his works in many countries around the world such as Italy, Switzerland, Japan, the United States, Spain, Brazil, Denmark, Hungary and France. To this day, he remains a very important artist of Italian abstraction and his works have kept their sensitivity and their power to transport the viewer in a geometric and simplified dimension of the current world.