Before I get into a historical and critical analysis of what characterizes Roberto Bosco’s study-wise heir to the poetics of existential realism in vogue in the seventies of the last century-I would like to begin with a prelude necessary to further address this body of work that reports the loneliness of our life today through a bitter path of representations.
For a long time many have heard the prophesying of the death of painting and eventually of art, replaced by more appropriate means of expression to the interests of the modern world of consumerism, more likely to receive messages through conceptual and often irreverent installations, videos, and the use of unusual materials like rags, glass, wood, and stones all assembled for a reading of complex decoding. They are not, nor do they claim to be, works of poetic expression and of content insight, but rather phenomena connected exclusively to philosophy, a theoretical discipline that has nothing to do with the essence of poetic art. Are painting, molded or sketched sculpture, and manual ability therefore destined to disappear, to die in technology, self-action in the experimentation that bears in itself irreparable denial of beauty, harmony, balance, and visual perception?
These conceptual experiments appear to be winning on the current scene of museums, the market, and national and international critique. They are represented by products that reflect the most worrying aspects of contemporary Western society, while the fruits of spirituality like art and poetry seem out of fashion in these dark times.
Art, in my opinion, is always and only a spiritual creative process, the result of an interior intuition that is converted into form and color. The artist, in this context, is a solitary creative subject, while the actual experimental operator is the object of a marketing operation where they are involved in a game of shares, more like subjects with sidekick roles, aesthetic operators only attentive to the growth of the quotes in a national and international market, seductive and well-orchestrated. Art, however, with its authentic values of chromatic writing, has not at all disappeared, because the artists with their inner troubles and emotions, with their sought suggestive expression, haven’t disappeared. They are happily free painters and sculptors, individualists, who meditate on sign and plastic form. They are alchemists of the palette and matter, researchers of tones and lines capable of communicating poetically.
Painter Roberto Bosco is one of those alchemists of sign and color, but with the ability to live in his and our time, portraying it with intimacy. He represents as an artist what is summarized in these few words of Ortega Y Gasset: “Wherever young muses present themselves, the mass rejects them. Modern art makes it possible that the best know one another amongst the grayness of the multitude and they learn that their mission consists in being few.” His is a study that analyzes the private and collective human condition that meditates on a disturbing scene, transposing it into a pictorial writing full of meaning. The following pages present a comprehensive review of his paintings carried out from the nineteen-nineties to today with sensitivity and wisdom, each of which is accompanied by my short explanatory comment of which every composition attests to the freedom of the message and the quality of execution. In writing them, I want to emphasize that this is a contemporary master, from his persuasive realization where the path of the contents is never separated from the quality of the pictorial construction.
Together, these works are a testament to how much Roberto Bosco is a bearer of a culture connected to his commitment to reveal pain with love. The faces, the bodies indoors, the anonymous people crowed on a street or on a metropolitan means of transportation, are the poetic and imaginative expression of the conscience of an intellectual who lives his time with lucid insight. If a lot of figurative contemporary art is above all formal, for which the study decays into any easy mannerism, conversely for Roberto Bosco, the point of historical reference regarding content messages remains Gustave Courbet. For the great French master of the nineteenth-century, painting could not and should not disregard human reality; in this context, it is necessary to use his definition that appears as a subtitle to his beautiful Atelier exhibited at the Louvre in Paris: Realist Allegory (Allegoria realista). In his own way in a superb sociological cross-section of society of his time, Courbet put together a variety of characters without an apparent narrative link. In turn, in a contemporary environment, Bosco continues the same poetic message: it has to do with an ideal commitment pursued with an acute sensibility, that turns to our everyday existence without ever falling into aesthetic formalism, rather letting his romantic ascendency clearly emerge. For this reason I find myself approaching the corpus of these exciting visual narratives with a critical and interpretive air very close to that of Georg Lukacs, who in the nineteen-fifties observed that the falsity of the false conscience illuminates the most fundamental determinations of every existence and should infringe on the basic necessities of being and of becoming objective.
Now I would like to adhere to a critical reading of the content represented in Bosco’s works, postponing the analysis of the quality of his compositions to the files of the paintings published later. In the process, the pictorial study of Roberto Bosco unfolds according to a completely coherent line of tendency throughout different thematic choices. Among the subjects of the early nineteen-nineties, a bare winter landscape isn’t missing, it being entitled Val Padana (1990). In its melancholy synthesis, the work is quite unsettling, given the absence of the human figure. But the sense of loneliness is not so much due to that absence as to the expressive sense of emptiness that is born from the representation of a nature that doesn’t prelude any imminent resurrection. In reality you can breathe the author’s inescapable pessimism in this work. Yet it is certain that he loves nature and humanity, especially when he takes in its most allusive aspects which always remain in its representation as an added value. But it is also evident that the protagonists of his canvases are never presented in a glorified environment, anything but. A sense of despair remains everywhere, like that of certain masters of German expressionism that operated in the years of the seizure of power by the Nazis. And ultimately: what does one ask of an author who expects an emotion from figurative art than to make his subjective vision comprehensible, his emotional sincerity evident, and his expressive form original? So the only way to consider Bosco’s works of the last decade is summed up in a few words: the autobiography of a soul.
Bosco’s poetic imagination appears to collide with revealing moments that come from the scenery that surrounds him-that surrounds us-made up of sounds, colors, and perspectives that change in the haste of our movements. They are moments of human solitude captured live, without rhetorical pretense, through chromatic and tonal passages that are anything but ardent-on the contrary, with very little color. He opts for light backgrounds that don’t weigh down the painful atmosphere of the visual narrative, but leaves suspended a world of anonymous and silent figures to which nothing opposes, not even the presence of light. But here there is never light. The presence of white is neutral, only functioning in the dialogue between the other hues that Bosco stretches out in a motivated and persuasive way.
With these paintings, our painter can be compared to the “Current” (Corrente) group, born in Milan between the two wars, that’s to say, to the figurative study of the cut existence of the nineteen-seventies, represented with different poetics and imagery of Gianfranco Ferroni and Alberto Sughi, painters of reality and solitude. Compared to them, his commitment is more allusive and therefore in its own way more complex, humanly deep but absolutely not illustrative; because Bosco is also an intellectual who writes and paints, following the civil and cultural tradition that thanks to him, has not been interrupted by people like Carlo Levi and Pier Paolo Pasolini who in their lives alternated writing with painting.
But Bosco over the years has increasingly favored painting, thanks to which he best expresses his perception of the pain of living and where his protagonists silently succumb to the darkness that surrounds them and invades them. So this is the peculiar significance of his composition, or his emotional directness, his will and capacity to confront the human condition. There is also a restless ignition as in the bursting and dramatic representation entitled The Goods (La merce), a work done in 2005 that depicts a scene of decay that from a distance looks to the poetic expression of the Englishman Francis Bacon. This is an important work which is a counterpoint to the poignant allegory of 2010 Concerto for Cornet Dedicated to Heaven (Concerto per cornetta dedicata al cielo) which is an absolute representation of the love the artist has for the infinite, rare on a thematic level and for now, completely unprecedented in his repertoire. In front of this painting like in front of another, Blue Thoughts (Pensieri azzurri), carried out the following year, we realize that we are emotionally involved with the strong personality of the artist that moves only in obedience to the creative impulses and convictions following his own path with extraordinary certainty, tied to its contents, defined by his own reasons, and knows how to express the suggestions that, from the outside, make an imprint on his mind. One cannot look at his painting except through the prism of its emotional charge to fully comprehend his visually impressive paintings like Gare San Lazare in 2005, The Human Condition (La condizione umana) in 2011 and Genious (Genialità) in 1997.
Roberto Bosco has an important place in the contemporary Italian figurative study. Meanwhile, his expressive message has a meaningful way of presenting itself and reacting to those in art who only know how to offer aesthetic messages with no content, producing works of lazy thinking, evasion, and conformity. Let’s take Bosco’s works for example instead: Man who Looks (Uomo che guarda) of 2006, or Paris After the Rain (Parigi dopo la pioggia) of 2009. These are splendid figurations full of energy where everything is expressed without conflict, but with the sadness of the inevitable. One must acknowledge that he doesn’t seek salvation in a utopian Arcadia or justifications through metaphysical visual games. His choice is to portray a humanity outside of time and history and to believe in painting as an instrument of discovery.
In 2011, Bosco dedicated an interesting series of works to the theme of the crowd, addressed as if it were made of replicates on a path without a destination (Paris 2, of 2009 and Figures with a Red Stripe (Figure con striscia rossa) of 2010). Men who come across one another without looking at each other, without ever smiling. Emblematic here is the prevailing use of black on a stage of ghostly appearances and shadows of mechanical movements like robots.
The same estrangement is transferred into the intimacy of a couple’s relationship as in Last Chapter (Ultimo capitolo) of 2001, where there are no more feelings to share, only bitter and helpless nudity.
All of Bosco’s visual study is the result of a well-defined formal structure not just in the formal sense, but also in the precise sense of the relationship that one image establishes with another and then the significance that results from such a relationship. Here the participatory pathos that closely links ideality with expression and the rhythmic flow of pictorial writing is the persuasive, creative, and instantly recognizable signature style of Roberto Bosco.
Paolo Levi
