(Vimercate/Monza 1935–2013)
Grigio, 1987, signed on the reverse Bonalumi, vinyl tempera and shaped canvas, 130 x 162 cm, on stretcher, (PS)

Photo certificate:
by the artist, signed, dated Bonalumi 87
Archivio Bonalumi, Milan, archive no. 87–062, March 2016

Provenance:
Lattuada Studio, Milan (gallery label)
Private Collection, Germany

In the 1970s, Agostino Bonalumi began his search for a matching object form for his works and increasingly set aside the pictorial elements in favour of a pronounced three-dimensionality. The structured paintings that thus emerged are at once images and sculptures, reaching beyond the boundaries of the panel and conquering the space around them. The wooden elements attached on the reverse of the canvas annul its pictorial two-dimensionality, modify its surface and create new, rhythmic light effects by means of “extroflexions“. In the work ‘Grigio’, these effects are accentuated by means of elongated rectangular bands in a lighter grey hue. Bonalumi intends to elevate the work of art to an integral part of its environment and use it to condition the latter.

The compact structure of the canvas is broken up by dynamic linear webs that run almost in parallel. As a result of the strategically positioned diagonal interruptions of the rhythmic parallel structure, the formal rigour of ‘Grigio’ dissolves into pointed triangles. With elongated rectangular stripes of a lighter colour shade, Bonalumi intensifies and complicates the light effects created by the “extroflexions“. As a result of this combination, the viewer perceives, besides the fine, parallel black and white structure of the surface, a recurring tension that changes depending on the way light falls on it.

In contrast with his typical application of a wholly monochrome paint, in the present case Bonalumi worked with at least four different layers of colour. All over the canvas, painted with two different shades of grey, the artists added a more pastose horizontal layer of paint in a blue-grey colour, topped with delicate dashed lines of black ink and white wax crayon that give the present work its unusual, very special character.