Gotthard Bonell

Bonell succeeds because he does not paint it as a motif pure and simple, in the wake of a remote tradition, but uses it as an interpretive pretext: the mountains of his childhood, left behind for Venice and Milan and later rediscovered, become custodians of a memory before which the artist positions himself in a state of listening, with a romantic and disenchanted attitude, like Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, yet aware that he is witnessing an inexorable nemesis. This process of ineluctable transformation of natural laws, subverted by human violence, is translated by the artist into infinite interpretations centered on the theme of the mountain. He portrays its rock, its ravines, the walls hidden in shadow, nature's awakening in the first light, the mountain mirrored in the still water of motionless lakes in windless air. He treats light with the glaucous skies of the sixteenth century in mind, with seventeenth-century atmospheres, with eyes nourished on Impressionist masterpieces and, above all, with the awareness that one must look to tradition in order to betray it, transform it, and thus reproduce one's own vision. Within his painting an inward interpretation forces its way in, producing barely perceptible transfigurations of the real. This can be seen in the chromatic flare-ups of certain acidified, almost artificial, unusual greens.
Bonell paints driven by a need that grants no respite, always questioning the object directly, in an immediate relationship with reality that brings him closer to the great pictorial tradition—to Leonardo, to Titian, to Albin Egger-Lienz—than to the positions of the present. He is a "classical" painter, so to speak.
This becomes clearer when one enters his studio, which closely resembles that of an old master: the air fragrant with oil and turpentine, tubes of paint scattered everywhere, and then an ox skull, dry and fragile leaves, fragrant fruit, a skull, sketches and drawings. A mirror, hung facing the paintings, reflects their images and multiplies their distance, forcing the gaze into a further mediation. It is here that Bonell works in layers, blending techniques until they become unrecognizable: a painting that seems exquisitely pictorial in its density hides the lightness of a drawing transferred onto tissue paper glued repeatedly onto the canvas. Sometimes, on a collage ground—newspaper clippings, old prints—the artist applies, in an almost childlike game, small pieces of thin paper that he then paints over. Drawing, erasing, gluing, repainting: a slow, patient process in which the work seems to preserve everything that has been done and undone, everything that can no longer be seen.
To drawing, in particular, Bonell has entrusted for more than forty years the most intimate and least exhibited part of his research: a direct, almost seismographic practice, in which the mark immediately registers the obsessive gaze with which the artist internalizes the real, transforming it into something ambiguous, at times surreal. A language that moves through rigorous linearism all the way to mixed techniques with colored pencils, and which in his most recent works dissolves bodies and landscapes into a dense web of fine lines, recalling Bonell the master of the printmaking arts.
Even in still life, a genre Bonell practices with the same intensity as landscape and portraiture, the body returns, masked in seeds and fruits of voluptuously sumptuous forms and swollen texture: enigmatic compositions, rich with a diffuse sexuality that Bonell shares with the gaze of Robert Mapplethorpe. As happens in nature, when in rock we recognize ammonites preserved for millennia, so within the interweaving of Bonell's forms one glimpses the profiles of reclining bodies, anatomical details hidden within the landscape or in vegetal matter: the mystery and ambiguity of the mark are not a stylistic affectation, but the very knot of his poetics—the longing for knowledge and, together, for the sharing of the body and of the nature that welcomes it.
It is here, ultimately, that all of Bonell's themes converge: corporeality and sexuality, transience and death are questions as ancient as humanity itself, and his painting embraces them without consolation, but also without despair, giving us back a fragile beauty precisely within the precariousness of existence.