Giorgio Bongiorni - Biography

Giorgio Bongiorni was born in 1949 in Gallarate and trained at the Brera Art School at the Busto Arsizio site. Since the seventies he has shown, in his painting of his, an iconography studied and in-depth with psychological-literary themes, using a personal technique, the result of constant experimentation. His pictorial expression arises from introspection and brings to light, through a controlled use of colors and signs, the deepest sensations but also the reflections and reactions that arouse in him the condition and behavior of man in contemporary society.

During his intense artistic research, he began by proposing figurative painting and then broadened his research towards abstract art.

During his journey he has elaborated a long cycle dedicated to the traces that man leaves in the environment: man, the fleeting protagonist of life on earth, feels the need to leave an imprint of his passage, sometimes unconsciously. These details are recreated on the canvas making the traces the protagonists of the artistic moment: objects, clothes, tires are inserted with skill and emerge with the desire to deceive the viewer through fake three-dimensional effects.

Another interesting artistic cycle by Bongiorni concerns the works carried out using polystyrene panels as a support. In these compositions the intervention of light is fundamental which, reflecting on the surface of the work, now in one way, now in another, gives different effects each time, making the paintings similar to sculpture.

His palette, based on the predominance of red, black and white, combined with large formats, make Giorgio Bongiorni's works bearers of a style that is distinctive of his progress.

He began exhibiting in 1977 and held his first solo exhibition the following year at the M.P. of Busto Arsizio.

In 1988 he was a founding member and first president of the 3A Artistic Association of Gallarate, from 1991 to 2015 he was a member of the Circolo degli Artisti of Varese and since 2016 he has been a member of the Free Artists Association of the province of Varese.

He taught drawing and painting techniques in the free courses of the University of Castellanza from 1998 to 2001 and from 2006 to 2013 he taught in the courses of painting techniques of the Association C.A.B (Centro Arte Cultura Bustese) of the city of Busto Arsizio (VA).

During his career he has participated in numerous group and personal exhibitions. His works are housed in public and private collections both in Italy and abroad. He lives and works in Gallarate.

SEE ALL ARTWORKS BY GIORGIO BONGIORNI

Critical Relationship:

Large layers alternate with clumps of vibrations and knots of coloristic vitality characterized by constant control and balance of the tonal timbre and careful and perfect execution that avoids improvisation and randomness. His paintings become more and more luminous, with a non-descriptive light that arises from within the work itself, from the qualities of his painting. His visionary figurations are broken up and fragmented into several parts by drafts of abstracting spaces that accentuate the state of restlessness and discomfort of the onlooker.

Silvio Zanella.

Bongiorni weaves his webs as a goddess and sometimes Arachne, challenging himself to the end. The warp and the weft of memory-matter give precisely this depth that from the surface of the visual induces, through the material of the work to go further, to enter; sometimes throwing you, sometimes taking you by the hand. Bongiorni's work - from the minute and precious graphics like jewels, to the good-sized canvases that scream architectural space - is a concert of memory - blood / sensation - word / story - fairytale / work - poetry / love - despair, in which fantastic inspiration - visual reality - technical skill are matched in unison, a fine attempt to reproduce the primordial "La".

Deborah Ferrari

Critical report Prof. Silvio Zanella.

Director of the Museum of Modern Art of Gallarate.

I have been following the painting activity of Giorgio Bongiorni since the seventies; in 1979 I presented him with an exhibition whose paintings could, and can, be considered a liberating exorcism from spiritual suffering. They are the confession of an artist who does not want to undergo, and indeed denounces, the condition of man-machine.

The titles of those works are "capitulation of an ideal", "separation of evil", "rebellion against conditioning", so eloquent as to nullify any comment. They are works chromatically stretched to the point of spasm, which present forms bristling with points and edges, such as images of structure contaminated between the machine and the human figure in a phase of dynamics and tragic disintegration.

After more than three years, Bongiorni's spirit calms down and he turns to other paths, renewing forms and contents. Its color becomes tonal, it dissolves in discreet and whispered chords but not devoid of identity and pictorial robustness, the forms melt, soften and enrich, the revolt and anger of the past give way to dreams at times even tinged with melancholy.

With the disappearance of the machine on the canvas, man is presented with his own integrity and his environment, with the landscape, architecture, decorative motifs that characterize him and distinguish him. The composition of these fragments is presented through overlapping and fading: memories of life, travel or diary notes, details taken from memory, proposals from the imagination. From these imaginations fantastic and surreal tales are born.

For almost all of the eighties decade Bongiorni went through and developed this open, not peremptory position, the possibility of further developments that were not long in coming towards the end of the decade.

His pictorial technique is refined, it becomes sophisticated and complex; the large drafts alternate with clumps of vibrations and knots of coloristic vitality characterized by constant control and balance of the tonal timbre and careful and perfect execution that avoids improvisations and randomness.

His paintings become more and more luminous, with a non-descriptive light that arises from within the work itself, from the qualities of his painting. The fantastic creation, the rejection of defined and definable reality, the tendency to mystery remain consistently always present in Bongioni's works.

Now his visionary figurations are broken up and fragmented into several parts by drafts of abstracting spaces that accentuate the state of restlessness and discomfort of the onlooker. Once again Bongiorni confesses to us that he believes in painting, in the imagination and in the spirituality of man, not in the only apparent immutability of reality.

His latest works, from the 1990s, present mysterious forms that arise from his dreams and his anxieties, but they are not terrible, on the contrary they have a spontaneous and natural sweetness and grace that makes me lay down on the authenticity of these creations and believe that the author has reached the uncommon wisdom of knowing how to read in himself.

Silvio Zanella