FAPESP launches 2014 Annual Report with exhibition of work by Maria Bonomi

Photographic reproductions of works by Italian-born artist who came to São Paulo almost 70 years ago illustrate FAPESP's latest annual report.

By José Tadeu Arantes, in collaboration with Phelipe Janning

Agência FAPESP – A group of mannequins attired in aluminum cans and glass bottles attracts the attention of visitors as they enter FAPESP’s headquarters in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. The installation, entitled Metempsicose, introduces an exhibition of work by Maria Bonomi, an Italian-born artist who emigrated to São Paulo in 1946. Several of Bonomi’s works have been used to illustrate FAPESP’s 2014 Annual Report, and, in accordance with tradition, large photographic reproductions of some of her works are now on display in FAPESP’s grand entrance hall.

In contrast with previous exhibitions featuring works by Francisco Rebolo, Aldo Bonadei, Lasar Segall, Tarsila do Amaral, Candido Portinari, Anita Malfatti, Arcangelo Ianelli, Tomie Ohtake and Renina Katz, this exhibition innovates by including not only 18 reproductions but also two original works: Metempsicose (1996) and Favela (2010), a large aluminum sculpture in the shape of a portal.

The exhibition was unveiled on July 22 in the presence of several guests. Opening the ceremony, FAPESP President Celso Lafer noted that this is the last report that he will sign, because his last term of office ends this year. “Because this is the last report of my second term, I have emphasized the theme of the internationalization of knowledge, my top priority while in office,” he said.

Referring affectionately to Maria Bonomi, Lafer highlighted the importance of the arts and humanities to FAPESP. “This effort to illustrate our annual reports with the work of great artists is a way of valorizing culture in its most substantive sense,” he said.

The next speaker was writer and curator José Teixeira Coelho Netto, Full Professor at the University of São Paulo. An essay by Teixeira Coelho on Bonomi opens the 2014 Annual Report.

Taking as his leitmotif the woodcut entitled A Ponte (“The Bridge”, 2011), Teixeira Coelho compared Bonomi’s art to four types of bridges.

“The first is a bridge to beauty, at a time when beauty has been strictly banned from the intentions of contemporary art and has become almost a sin,” he said. “The second is a bridge to a different ethics, both in her work, where she is faithful to herself, and in her relations with society, as someone who has never failed to speak out against abuses and has always refused what she calls ‘moral laziness’. The third is a bridge to the collective, going beyond the space of galleries and museums to arrive at the public space. Fourth and last is a bridge to knowledge: she explores, investigates and transmits knowledge acquired through sheer hard work and creativity.”

Visibly moved, Bonomi thanked Lafer and Teixeira Coelho for their kind words and acknowledged the support received from FAPESP’s staff in helping produce the report and organize the exhibition. Interaction between artists and the public is important. She went on, “When things get sordid, you have to take to the streets or the walls. Because artists must distribute what they perceive. The public gives back to them. Without that feedback, the artist is in darkness.”

Multitalented

Brimming with energy, Bonomi is a multitalented artist and profoundly professional. During her 65-year career, since she began studying painting and drawing with Yolanda Mohalyi in the city of São Paulo, she has produced every kind of visual art, from engravings to sculptures, book illustrations, theater sets and costume designs, as well as paintings and drawings.

Bonomi has produced miniature illustrations for books of poetry and large-scale stage designs, intimist engravings and monumental interventions in public spaces, such as an enormous panel in São Paulo’s central train and subway station (Estação da Luz), measuring 3 m in height by 73 m in length. However, in every case, she insists, her guiding principle has been the language of engraving and the construction of space based on simple elements, line and groove.

Bonomi was born in July 1935 on the shores of Lake Maggiore in a village not far from Milan. Having just turned 80, she is bubbling with creative effervescence, receiving commissions, constantly traveling, producing smaller pieces, such as A Ponte, her 2011 woodcut, and larger works, such as a panel alluding to the Discovery of Brazil (2014), comprising two triangular bronze slabs, each weighing 400 kg, which was created for Teatro L'Occitane in Trancoso, Bahia. Agência FAPESP interviewed Maria Bonomi in her studio.

Agência FAPESP – Your creative vitality as an artist is still in full force. You continue working as hard as ever, and nothing is complete, but at the age of 80 you’re entitled to take a look back. What meanings do you perceive as you recall your life experience?
Maria Bonomi – That’s a very hard question. I don’t like to look back, in case I turn into a pillar of salt. I’m obliged to look at past work of my own. Each piece is full of meaning, with all the reason for being it had at the moment of its creation. That in itself is sufficient. So no, I haven’t started to look back yet. Perhaps I will some day, following your advice. I can’t evaluate my own work. What I can say is I’ve learned a huge amount. As you said, my work isn’t complete: it’s still a work in progress. True, there isn’t a great deal of time left. There’s more time behind than ahead, unless some scientific miracle happens. So, the fact that I haven’t much time keeps me continuously striving to complete. Here, I do actually have to look back. Such and such a piece turned out like this but could have been different. So, I feel like returning to the theme. That’s learning, extending. I hope I have the vitality to get to the finishing line. But the finishing line will be on the other side of the bridge. The conclusion doesn’t exist as knowledge. It’s always a question. Always a search.

Agência FAPESP – Even so, do you see lines of force running through all your work?
Bonomi – Yes. What I do is a kind of narrative. I tell the story of what I live through, what I perceive, what affects me. I try to experience directly what’s happening and translate this experience into visual terms. Of course, there are several forms of expression for this – public works or intimist works. I illustrate this experience of life. There is a path. But you make your path as you go. That’s an old saying. It recurs only as experience. What I learned yesterday, I use today. And today I’m learning what I’ll use tomorrow.

Agência FAPESP – During your formative years, you were taught in Brazil by three great artists: Yolanda Mohalyi (1909-78), Karl Plattner (1919-86) and Lívio Abramo (1903-93). What was each one’s most important legacy to you?
Bonomi – Karl Plattner’s main influence on me was material. He taught me a lot about the use of materials, how to get different effects, tricks of the trade. In his hands, I practically became an Italian Renaissance painter. At the same time, in formal terms, he showed me the very modern possibility of destroying the natural image to geometrize it. Yolanda Mohalyi was a fantastic soul, a solemn painter, really first rate. She taught me the delicacy of color, how colors meet, how to meld them smoothly into each other, how color can be spatial, everything you can do with colors in watercolor and in oils. I worked in her studio for a long time. Plattner was structure; Mohalyi was the importance of detail. But Lívio Abramo was the most important encounter. First, I met his work. I only met him personally later on. Both meetings were difficult but fascinating. His work attracted me for its conciseness and rigor, its essence. Lívio worked only with line, in black and white. This put the language of the groove, the line, in the foreground, reduced to its last consequences. All highly simplified and at the same time magnificent, composing cathedrals of light and forms. His attitude impressed me deeply. I’m still living with the questions he presented. They’re the basic questions associated with engraving and printmaking – line, matrix, white, black, cutting, feeling the wood’s resistance, opening up a space. I suffered a lot with him. For a start, he made me spend three months just sanding wood, so I’d understand what I was dealing with. And so it went on.

Agência FAPESP – Did you already feel you must integrate all these different influences, or were you just interested in living the present?
Bonomi – I drew and painted. My work developed in these contexts, but I didn’t have the idea of integrating them. It wasn’t a deliberate act. Integration happened of its own accord. I was breathing, and I learned to breathe more deeply.

Agência FAPESP – Later, you went to the United States, where you studied with Seong Moy (1921-2013). Was he your gateway to Chinese culture, or did you approach China by a different route?
Bonomi – The situation in Brazil was pretty stagnant. I managed to get a grant to work with Seong Moy in New York. By this time, I was already concentrating deeply on woodcut printmaking. I thought of nothing else. Seong Moy was considered the master of printmaking. He introduced me to large formats, color, overlapping colors, transparency, all the virtuosity of traditional Chinese printmaking. At the same time, of course, he was contemporary, very free with regard to the more conventional printmaking done in universities – at Columbia University, for example. But he was also heir to an ancestral tradition and very involved with Chinese gesture. So yes, he did open the door to China for me, but he did so as a presence, a sensibility, a suggestion of perception. He taught me to perceive certain questions that constitute the Oriental vision, which is very different to our vision deriving from Europe. In the same direction, I was also influenced by Sugai [Japanese artist Kumi Sugai (1919-96)]. I soaked up all these influences and many others. They opened doors for me. I went through and kept on going.

Agência FAPESP – You first went to China in the mid-1970s, right?
Bonomi – Yes, in 1974. I went with the first group of Brazilians to visit China, at the invitation of the Chinese government. It was a most interesting trip, lasting about 40 days. I saw a lot of places, and there came a point when I started getting anxious because I was unable to see any prints. There were just all those political posters and prints made to order for the Party, for the State. I knew there were two independent printmakers, Wu Biduan (born 1926) and Gu Yuan (1919-96), but I couldn’t get access to them. So, I staged a hunger strike in a cemetery because I wanted to meet them. Our minders decided to calm me down by taking me to a big printmaking studio. But that was worse because professionals were working there on specialized themes, but they weren’t authors. There was no authorship; the idea of the authorship was actually outlawed. I insisted. And our minders eventually managed to arrange a meeting with Wu Biduan and Gu Yuan. At the time, they were more or less banned. Now, they’re considered forerunners of today’s Chinese printmaking school.

Agência FAPESP – If we could come back to the 1970s, to the time you took an important stand against the military dictatorship. You created the series “Balada do Terror”, and you were arrested and interrogated by the secret police, the DOI-CODI. Tell us about this stand.
Bonomi – It was impossible to be in favor of the dictatorship or remain indifferent because there was such rigid censorship, and freedom of expression was so restricted. The repression was suffocating, unbearable. I would have been against any kind of tyranny, but I was active in the background, as it were. Many of my friends were being arrested, and we took pains to look after their children. I also participated in a printmaking studio alongside Lívio Abramo, who was a Trotskyist. We produced pamphlets and posters in the studio. The period was a watershed – you were either on one side or the other.

Agência FAPESP – Was it in this context that the idea of public art matured, or did that start earlier?
Bonomi – It materialized at that moment, but the idea of public art had always been with me because it flows naturally from the printmaking process. Engraving is an art form to which multiplication is intrinsic. You produce several copies from the same matrix. You number each one and sell them or give them away. Nevertheless, relatively few people see your work. At that time, when so many large-scale and even monumental buildings and other architectural works were being produced, I believed people lacked contact with art. They had no direct experience of or communion with art. So, in my mind, by going into a large public space, I could interact with passers-by. I could attract the attention of people who were crossing the square or whatever. They would be intrigued and touched in some way. To a certain extent, this idea derived from printmaking technique itself, plus the extra thrust of reaching a wider audience. Questions closely linked to the language of printmaking went out into the public space: I produced grooves in big concrete walls. At the same time, new questions relating to large formats were added: one had to take the pedestrian traffic into consideration, the lighting conditions in which the traffic would be most intense, and so on. They were highly interesting experiences.

Agência FAPESP – What was the first experience?
Bonomi – Actually, it started with a playful remark by Artigas [architect João Batista Vilanova Artigas (1915-85)]. He said, “Maria, you should take to the walls.” And, he put up a print of mine on a wall at FAU [the University of São Paulo’s School of Architecture & Urbanism]. He unwittingly gave me the right cue. I thought, “Why not make the wall itself into a print?” This idea ripened in my mind. In those days, I was sometimes invited to work with boldly innovative architects. There was none of this real estate fever. Nowadays, I go into these enormous tower blocks and see the empty lobbies lined with marble, granite, Belgian glass, when they could be enlivened by art works that modify the passer-by. Because public art is transformative: people walk past it, see it, and ask themselves questions.

Agência FAPESP – You say public art transforms people who see it. How has it changed your own work?
Bonomi – That’s an interesting question. I’ve gone as far as I can with paper, using large sizes. Public art has enabled me to do even bigger pieces, to keep on magnifying, to bring almost structural, architectural questions into my work.

Agência FAPESP – How do these monumental pieces coexist with your more intimist work?
Bonomi – Any huge piece starts with a small maquette. When I make a maquette or a sketch, that’s intimist. Of course, a lot of accumulated knowledge underlies it. Large pieces aren’t just blow-ups of small ones. Many questions relating to the larger scale have to be thought out and resolved mentally before I even make the maquette.

Agência FAPESP – You had a lot of contact with two major writers, Clarice Lispector (1920-77) and Cecília Meireles (1901-64). What were these relationships like?
Bonomi – Clarice and I were great friends. I met her in Washington. I never illustrated any of her work, but we were very close, so close that we influenced each other all the time. She even began to paint, and she would joke that she engraved my prints, and I wrote her books. With Cecília, it was different. I was invited to illustrate a children’s book she was writing, called Ou isto ou aquilo. It was the last book she wrote, actually. By then, she was in São Paulo having treatment. She wrote the poems in the hospital and sent them to me as she wrote. I took the illustrations to show her, and she critiqued them. I felt transported into the child’s world of these poems and her comments were as enthusiastic in return. It was a very rich exchange. She was a fabulous poet and enjoyed the give-and-take immensely. That’s why I say the arts are transformative. You’re changed by what you see, hear or touch.