“Beauty has to be experienced, not described.”—Agostino Bonalumi
Born in 1935, Agostino Bonalumi was at the forefront of the exceptional wave of Italian artists who followed Lucio Fontana in the late 1950s and 1960s. Influenced by Fontana’s own spatial experiments with the canvas, Bonalumi had begun working with Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni as early as 1958. By the mid-1960s, Bonalumi’s reputation was reaching new heights both internationally and at home, with strong links to Germany’s Zero artists and critics in Italy already beginning to recognise his importance; in 1966, the artist was invited to take part at the Venice Biennale for the first time.
Bonalumi’s signature works built upon Fontana’s revolutionary act of slashing canvases with a knife. He called his works estroflessioni, essentially, canvases in a single colour that the artist stretched, probed, and deformed from behind in all manner of ingenious ways. With the beauty and simplicity of these abstract forms, Bonalumi extended the picture plane into what traditionally had been the space of the viewer, creating paintings that were simultaneously sculptures, which the contemporary critic Gillo Dorfles dubbed pitture-oggetti (painting-objects). Alongside Fontana with his knife, Burri with his blowtorch, and Castellani, who drove nails into the back of his pictorial surfaces, Bonalumi was part of a redefinition of painting: the pictorial plane became what American art historian Harold Rosenberg called “an arena in which to act.”
Alternately contracting and expanding into the space of the viewer, curving and arcing in sumptuous Ferrari red, and ultimately disrupting the traditional expectations and experience of a work of art, Bonalumi’s Rosso of 1967 is a striking example of the artist’s trademark estroflessioni works—a vision of space and form both timeless and futuristic. Manipulating the surface of his support, Bonalumi created gracefully rounded, abstract structures that emerge from the surface of the painting to explore the space around them. The result in Rosso 1967 is a kinetic, flowing visual experience that carries the eye around the work’s gleaming red contours, swelling and rippling from the left until it meets the curved vertical column that seems to grow from within the painting in a strangely organic, ambiguous eruption, and then subsides at the right like the undulation of a wave. The structure occupies the wall with a classical elegance, imposing in its solidity—and yet its shape ultimately seems to dissolve into something less real, an imprint left on another material rather than any kind of essential substance itself. Indeed, as the work curves in the places where edges should be, Bonalumi seems to call into question the finality and resolution of painting itself—the definition provided by a square frame has been effaced, and the edge of the work, transfigured into a cylindrical shape curves out of sight, its end point a mystery.
Rosso 1967 is a magnificent example of Bonalumi’s innovative approach to his art. Monumental in scale and pristine in its condition, it moreover represents a key turning point in the artist’s practice. 1967 was a crucial year for Bonalumi. That summer, a major exhibition curated by the most influential Italian art critics took place in Foligno. Entitled Lo spazio dell’immagine, the exhibition was a truly extraordinary event, presenting ground-breaking new work which challenged all traditional assumptions about the relationship between work a work of art and its viewer. For Foligno, Bonalumi created Blu Abitabile (Inhabitable Blue), the first of a new evolution of the estroflessioni, which came in the form of whole environments he created out of them for visitors to walk through. This immersive installation of interlocking blue elements both enveloped viewers and, at three metres high, towered above them, too. A few months later, in October, Bonalumi had his first solo show in New York, organised by Galleria Bonino; the exhibition mainly featured works that the artist had made while in the city, which the gallery purchased en bloc. While in America, Bonalumi discovered ciré, an elastic waxed fabric whose glossy finish and flexibility intrigued the artist. Bonalumi used ciré for only a short span of time, mainly between 1967 to 1971, but in doing so realized some of his most spectacular creations, including the present work.
