News

White and black are the foundations of Bruno Biondi’s poetics. Without going to bother the usual preconceived concepts of Yin and Yang or those of the dark side and the bright side present in each of us; I deeply think I want to give a much more personal and intimate reading to the work of such an evocative artist. Looking at this latest two-colour project, I immediately find an intense poetic connection with Malevich’s “Black Square” and with his Suprematist thought that has given so much to the incipit of the Russian Vanguard and beyond. “The evocation aimed at pure non-objectivity in the empty white of a free void” (cited Malevich) is as inherent in Malevich’s black square as it is in the creative act of the painter Biondi. The idea of transforming the artist into the zero of the form is the creation of a new non-objective realism. The act of painting is therefore liberating and is freed from the concept of aesthetics, and it goes further; placing at the centre of creativity the pictorial act in itself and the sensitivity that gets by those who paint and those who then become users. Biondi is therefore not based on the representation of reality but brings his works back to the essence of art which is, therefore, an end in itself. The fusion of vertical concepts and fields, or surfaces, is now a prominent factor. In some works, we can see how the excavation becomes white if it dwells on white and black if it is traced on black - as the artist himself explains - and vice versa, in a mirror image. However, the creative process does not stop there; it is in constant evolution. In this perspective, what a single element: color, flanked by the concept of verticality - which is the typical emblem of this artist’s art - leads us to want to reflect on the possibility of inner elevation (in a vertical sense), towards the search for a light, a spiritual and thaumaturgical evocation that looks to the purification of the soul, from the painful past; freeing ourselves from earthly suffering. Then here is Biondi’s past - artistic but also human - returning through memory. The reference to the works of the past is in front of us and is inexorable, indelible, indestructible. If in the past exhibitions verticality was often accompanied by the gesture of excavation in the table or the canvas by the artist, in order to go further, even though a liberating act; now the accent is placed more on the matrices of black and white and then in the vertical line, thus inserting a minimalist synthesis and approaching in a decidedly more mature and synthetically directed way to the senses and inner emotional worlds... It may seem that the subject is expressed only by vertical concepts, but it is not so. Looking more closely at the poetics and paintings of this new Milanese exhibition, we will notice that the subject is also the material research, which is the true genesis that allows life to vertical concepts: thanks to the turning of whites and blacks, of light, greys, of the dirty whites and the intrinsic meanings arising from these inner landscapes. It is from this reflection that the project of the “ten worlds” is born, ten sensations that are weakened by vital states that can start from the lowest worlds up to the highest, that is enlightened (Hell, Greed, Animality, Anger, Humanity, Ecstasy, Study, Partial enlightenment, Bodhisattva and finally Buddhahood) which let their mutual possession emerge at the same time. The Lotus Sutra is an essential Buddhist teaching that exposes the mutual possession of the ten worlds (which can be contained in one another allowing consequently to illuminate even the lower worlds) to reveal that ordinary people can manifest their Buddhahood so as they are, without having to be reborn in another form or another land. The true meaning of perceiving the ten worlds within one’s mind, therefore, consists in manifesting the world of Buddhahood - that is, the illuminated part of us, the purest and highest world - that exists in one’s life. Looking at the works of the artist, I can perceive the existence of all the ten worlds in every single work and not only by differentiating every single mood in the single picture. All the spiritual worlds are contained in it and unfold from the blacks of hell to the whites of enlightenment, passing through our minds thanks to the sign of the excavation that evokes the inner search. Verticality reminds us of the world of study and research and so on... This happens for every single inner world, aiming at reaching the summit; walking more and more towards the other, towards that feeling of balance and quiescence that from the state of latency turns towards a mere manifest effect of inner peace to which the artist longs deep in his heart and which is then the nemesis as quoted by Nietzsche, therefore deliberately placed at the beginning of this text. Then all that remains is to sink into the setting of a Former Church, like that of San Celso in Milan, a place that par excellence refers to what was once, that is a place of prayer, of recollection, and that today desecrated allows us to welcome this artistic exhibition that is so intimately connected with the spirituality of each of us and the artist.