Illustration

VOL 78 Nº 6
NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2010
Illustration
JOSE BONANNO
(CONTEMPORARY ARGENTINE PLASTIC ARTIST)
José Bonanno’s creation contains auras. They
represent the singularity of each painting, their
identity with the author’s ideology, the possibility of
transmitting more than the image. It may certify the
painter’s elegance but above all it sets the genuine
soul with which the work was expressed. It is the
identification that would go with it forever. Until
forgetfulness or glory. In the artist’s message we find
a balance of colour and idea that are expanded until
affecting senses. He reaches them through a freedom
of style technically admirable (Figure 1). In Bonanno
we find contemplation, correspondence with nature
and imagination. Far form overcrowding he is the
owner of his ideas and time.
ART SHOWS US THAT IT IS NOT ENOUGH WITH FAITH TO
UNDERSTAND MEN
Theodor Adorno (1) tried to be convincing. So his
voice said: - Walter you must go to America. Here we
would be doomed by Nazism.
Walter Benjamín face’s (2) did not fluster, and
turned to look his friend eyes’. – Here are still
positions to defend in Europe. They got separated
doubting meeting again. Time after, when entering
his apartment in Paris, he found that Gestapo had
confiscated his books. He escaped to Lourdes. He
would try to arrive in Spain and once there leave to
the United States from Lisbon. He walked with other
refugees to Portbou on the frontier of France with
Spain. That day, 26th September 1940, they found
that the customs was closed. He could have taken
another way with no guards but his cardiac complaint
impeded such effort. Back to the hotel he preferred
suicide to slow extermination. As in his last twenty
years there was a painting of Paul Klee (3) (Figure
3). The “Angelus Novus” (1920) to whom he had
dedicated a metaphor in his “Tesis IX”. “The angel
would like to stop, wake the dead and rebuild what
has been smashed. But a storm [called progress]
descends from the Paradise and swirls in his wings
and it is so strong that the angel cannot fold them…
carrying him out to the future”. (4) At the dawn of
avant-garde movements, Paul Klee’s painting and
the adjective of catastrophe given by Benjamín to the
“Amarradero”
José Bonanno
history would join art with Heidegger’s philosophy
(“man is a being for death”) (5) to examine in detail
the existential exploration of pain and ephemeral. To
reveal the inadequate progress. Theodor recovered the
painting, and it is at the Museum Israel of Jerusalem.
This painting is important due to its history but also
because it means the return to that anthropological
that moves beings from art.
MEN INCESSANT DILUTE IN THEIR OWN MEMORY
Contemporary men have contradictions. They
became anonymous beings, overcrowded. They see
with nostalgia their own obscurity. Art try to explain
men that technologic experience had not separate
them of being ephemeral and circumstantial. The
“Angelus Novus” seems to merge in every artist and
in innumerable works warning of excessive utopias.
The introduction of the film and the photograph in art
makes important the instant. In Wiger, work presented
in Paris (Figure 3), nature replaces mystic. (6) Not
only an angel but a storm is found in his destiny. A
spell that moves on the man and that answers with the
same voracity he does on his fellow man. She, warning
evolution, advances indifferent and aggressive. Unfold
and dark wings stand out threatening. She does not
try to stop as the “Angelus Novus”. The magical gives
place to reality in the centre of the scene. Man is a
bereaved, selfless observer. External.
Impressionists had broken natural observation
of classical art incorporating the representation of
senses. Avant-gardism (Cubism, Fauvism, Dadaism,
Surrealism) releases men to their creative freedom.
Excessive technology disturbs hope and men lost in
their own memories. The divine presence of Paul
Klee’s painting is reinvented in each artist. Also in the
contemporary Argentine José Bonanno (Cover figure).
In the painting there is no angel and storm. Here the
man is participant. He looks to progress. Everything is
near in the newness and too far for his need. He does
not need to indicate the horizon. He is isolated, alone
in an interconnected world. He is instantly informed.
Near everything, he is rejected. He asks if it is possible
to continue his way or disappear in order not to be a
prisoner of technologic voracity that excludes “human
factor”. He does not turn to see the past. Future is a
copy of history. Man tends to indifference as defense.
The sacred is a broken compass; it exists in the
imagination of man. In this confrontation between
history and conscience tends to several episodes, to
live several lives in one, some of them parallel. Man
has the ability to reinvent himself once there is no
hope of sacred and hell. And with those immortality,
revelation that has no answer yet.
“Ángelus Novus”
Paul Klee
Jorge C. Trainini
OCASSIONAL NOTES
1. Adorno Theodor. Escritor alemán (1903-1969).
2. Benjamín Walter. Ensayista alemán (1892-1940).
3. Paul Klee. Pintor expresionista alemán (1897-1940).
4. Benjamín Walter. “Conceptos de Filosofía de la Historia”. Caronte
Ed. La Plata, 2007.
5. Heidegger Martín. “El ser y el tiempo”. México: Fondo de Cultura
Económica; 1951.
6. Wiger F. Muestra en Barrio Latino, París, 2010.
No title. Photograph
F. Wiger, Paris