The crux of Aurelio Bruni’s art
is memory: that function of the mind capable of calling up - visually
in the case of painters – past experience via the four phases
of memorizing, retaining, recalling and recognition. Of course the
faculty that regulates memories has always been connected to Art,
since according to classic mythology Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory,
daughter of Uranus (Sky or Heaven) and of Gaia (Earth), in an amorous
union with Zeus conceived the nine Muses: tutelary divinities of
poetry and the arts, Apollo’s faithful companions.
It is precisely in exercising memory that Bruni’s manner moves
towards “museum painting,” aimed at recovering the classic
idiom and the loftiest figurative tradition, not in the sense of
a sterile repertory of iconographic models, but constituting a modus
vivendi and above all a vocabulary capable of narrating the episodes
of the present. In the early 1950s, De Chirico, after his metaphysical
phase, was one of the first artists to open the path to a painting
that was “impregnated by museum,” insisting on technique,
on the “bella maniera” and the absolute objective fidelity
of the image. His was a painting done with “his right hand”
– he used to say – the one predisposed to realism, guaranteed
by the mastery of the craft. The desire to decline in the present
the lessons of the masters of the past was also felt by a group
of artists defined Hypermannerists by critics between the end of
the Seventies and the beginning of the next decade. Cultured painters,
Anachronists, Nuovi Nuovi, depending on the individual stylistic
features. Indifferent to the various labels and without feeling
he had to be identified with any specific movement, in those years
Aurelio Bruni developed an expressive language of his own, faithful
to the cult of beauty conceived of in classic terms. At the same
time he began his exhibition activity, with a one-man show at the
Galleria Chariot in Rome.
Bruni chose the path of realism, but his is not a verist type of
narration. He uses the instruments of myth and fantasy of a romantic
matrix to flee from and transfigure the occasionally banal, vulgar,
in other cases tragic, but always disappointing, contingent reality.
His works at the time were populated by the ancient Gods or heroes
resembling the protagonists of the Nordic sagas. He plundered the
repertory of Art History. His thoughts took shape as figures. In
his mind images associated and confronted each other, transformed
into iconographies. Iconographies transferred to canvas, veiled
with heroic melancholy, amorous languor, idealizing concepts, religious
aspirations.
One of his favorite themes is Still Life, treated alone or inserted
into a broader context, maintaining the usual significance of memento
mori and moralizing admonishment on vanitas, on the fleetingness
of life. Even so Bruni adds a personal iconographic feature: threads
or strings, varying in length, thickness and color, but clearly
evident in their bright tones. A significant example is the Composition
with Rape of Persephone, resplendent homage to Bernini’s baroque
genius and Flemish Renaissance painting with its motif of interior-exterior
and the lenticular realism of the landscape described in a bird’s
eye view. The colored strings or slender cords are wrapped around
the objects, interweave, create aerial forms, at times seem remnants
abandoned by a distracted tailor, or disappear in the cavities of
crumbling walls or behind heavy curtains, Are they learned allusions
to Ariadne’s thread, essential in finding one’s way
through the meanders of memory? Or a sign to be thought of as a
visual persistence of a gesture?
Bruni’s stylistic virtuosity is such that he succeeds in describing
the material consistency of the elements depicted in every little
detail, suggesting their tactile-visual sensations: the cold smooth
surfaces of sculptured marble, the rough surface textures of the
oranges and lemons opposed to that of the smooth and shiny apples,
the silken effects of brocades, the worn pages of a dusty book,
the sparkling luminosity of gold or metal, the diaphanous shimmer
of water and tears, the voluminous softness of hair, the transparency
of glass in which the objects are reflected. His fascination with
Caravaggio’s masterpieces is evident. The realism, above all
the “tenebrismo,” those clear blades of light that cut
through the obscurity to define the shapes of the objects and have
them emerge from the darkness, bring to mind the revolutionary genius
of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Centuries after his death
Caravaggio, criticized for his way of painting so far removed from
academic idealization of any kind, considered a heresiarch, an enemy
of the “bella maniera,” “the assassin of painting”
– according to Poussin -, would never have expected that a
painter inspired by his manner would have been called academic and
classicist. Unquestionably Art is the child of its time and expression
of the society that produced it. But because of the historical Viconian
“cursi and ricursi”, styles and tastes recur over and
over in the panorama of artistic creation. In this complex, and
let us say, absurd time, heir to Postmodernism, or its latest spin-off,
ephemeral tendencies, ways and types of art that are completely
unlike each other coexist, at times screaming out at us and commercialized
as publicity ads. It is in this historical moment that a growing
interest in figurative painting of images, which I consider an inalienable
value, is coming to the fore.
This Umbrian painter is not afraid to demonstrate the excellence
of his masterly technique. He is a “pictor classicus”
– to borrow De Chirico’s autodefinition – for
whom classicism is perfection of the image and impeccable execution.
His “return to the museum” is not coldly cerebral, but
emotionally participated in with pathos. Myths, legends, real or
imaginary figures, heroes of the Christian faith, all live with
the same intensity in his paintings. Bruni asks the spectator to
be intellectually and spiritually involved. He metes out suggestions,
describes the objects around him with crystalline clarity, as well
as those oneiric visions that leave an indelible mark on the eye
and make the soul shudder.
What dominates in the landscapes, immersed in a metahistorical time,
is a panic sense of nature, seen variably as mother-stepmother.
Rural country landscapes alternate with desolate and impervious
rocky scenarios, like the stalagmitic mountains that serve as a
majestic backdrop to the disastrous Fall of Icarus.
In his portraits the artists gives his sitters a mythical aura,
at times even with epic tones. On the other hand in dealing with
religious themes he humanizes the saints, without diminishing their
spiritual greatness and force. Claire, for example, is shown in
the most intense and dramatic moment of her earthly life: the shadow
of the crucifix, the only sacred element, can barely be seen in
a corner on the back wall in the light of a new day, when, after
a sleepless night, the young woman grasps the scissors, about to
cut her long hair as a sign of her renouncing all material goods.
His Saint Francis of Assisi is moved to tears thanking the Lord
for the daily bread to share with his brothers. Bruni sees Jerome
with his usual traditional iconographic attributes with the lion,
his only companion in the desert, shown in the form of a stone relief,
the skull (memento mori) supporting the Bible the anchorite saint
translated, the penitential stone, and the red hat emblem of his
rank as cardinal bestowed by the Church. The human expression of
his face is sublimated by the transcendental intensity of his expression.
That same intensity glows in the eyes of Moses as he leaves the
lands of Egypt. Bruni in this cases adopts a photographic realism.
In portraiture he concentrates on faithfully and minutely registering
the physiognomies, but his acute study goes further into an introspective
and psychological analysis, entrusting the task of revealing the
self of the protagonist to a gesture or the addition of an ichnographic
element. The self-portraits merit particular mention. In his Self-portrait
with Headdress, he shows himself, with a high and mighty air, behind
a marble parapet on which a scroll is resting – and in the
best tradition of the northern Renaissance – and wearing a
sort of turban interwoven with colored threads and light, an extraordinary
pictorial passage. Similarly in Man Reading he describes the headdress
with its silver highlights, but attention is drawn both to the still
life of fabrics and cushions in a marvelous perspective view, and
the deep chiaroscuro that caresses and shapes the forms. In other
cases the painter imagines himself as a Sentinel in the Desert,
last and solitary keeper of atavic traditions, like a warrior transformed
into a marble statute in a slow but inexorable metamorphosis, or
as a man sunk in a solitary meditation, or as an actor in this great
theater of the world wearing a broken mask.
Aurelio Bruni’s genius is many-sided, refined and sensitive,
solitary, reflexive and fertile, nourished by the splendor of art
and the harmony of music. Courageously coherent, the artist pursues
his expressive studies in an attempt to offer a possible key to
the interpretation of reality. He is a child of his times. Drawing
forms and syntagma from the past to give this multiform and troubled
present some form of meaning cannot be considered anachronistic.
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