ADRIANNA BONOMI'S DEPTHS

by Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret

In Adrianna Bonomi's landscapes, characters and objects there is the above and the below, the inside and the outside. Is this the effect of the telluric infusion of the Breton earth on the artist? In any case, an oscillation of the gaze occurs. He begins to poach as much on the side of the unconscious as on the invisible - which is a bit the same thing... Dolmens and forests of Brocéliande or elsewhere just like the key to dreams take on strange allure and unpredictable proportions. What is heavy or mass flies away. What is light and innocent collapses under the yoke of a colored secret. Playing on interior and exterior, the artist brings out a world as rupestrian as symbolic but with a particular symbolism. As with a Miro, this one refers only to itself.

Time is suspended in a complex world. Painting is never a prisoner of the anecdote, of the precise moment. It is in the filmy in-between that separates times to show their strata. For Adrianna Bonomi, art plays the role of a ferryman, an intermediary. It is the film or rather the milk skin that separates two things of the same nature: a time that has taken place, another that awaits its fate. One almost disappeared, the other to come. In the present, painting bears witness to this passage. There is therefore a mix in space. Creation therefore offers two banks, two visual impressions, two realities (or several) of the same image. And suddenly a strange softness emerges. It invades everything: the similar, the raw and the different. This softness has nothing sentimental about it. It repudiates the sharpness of aims and alters what is only artifice. It seems enveloping, natural, permanent. We can neither reason with it nor be imbued with it. It is a strange, almost extravagant sweetness under a sky or a background of talc.

Sometimes nocturnal and almost dark, rather minimalist in its figures, the work is striking. Adrianna Bonomi is carrying out real research on the image and its relationship to reality as well as its symbols. The artist plays with representation in a masterful way as she plays with the border space that constitutes appearance as a beach and border. She creates a world of mysterious and rocky sensations and projects a vision that opens a kind of link and gap. Each canvas creates strange breaths. They suggest an obsession, a haunting from which the creator does not want to free himself but to show the possibilities of infinite variations within a pictorial universe that is both depopulated and recomposed. It brings us back to a place that is as first, primitive, simple as it is sophisticated and luminous.

With Adrianna Bonomi, painting seems to elude us but nevertheless resists in an essential way. Feigned incantation, detours become joint operations of her approach to the world. We access an image with a particular status. It is transformed into a symbol and the symbol is transformed into a vision. In this mutual vertigo a sort of perceptive trauma is created. But a paradoxically soothing trauma. Reaching it does not amount to finding what we expect because this space does not bring together the same, the same. And if painting seems to open up to a mirror effect: this mirror is a trap: sight becomes widowed of what it hoped to expect. What more could you ask of painting?

Jean-Pierre Gavard-Perret

Senior lecturer

at the University of Savoie