Roberto Bosco has developed in the last four or five years a particular form of art consistent in the representation of a continuous flow of a crowd that seems to come toward the painter. Bosco represents the movement of individuals, unaware of each other, like in a movie shoot where the rule to follow is to create the feeling of life passing before our eyes in a continuous movement, but threatened by a latent and relentless drive of death and annihilation. A type of Vanitas Vanitatum. Bosco has given different versions of this type of theme, with different subjects like the meeting at the Bar, the passengers swarming into the train station, women waiting, the silent conversations in which someone signs an agreement or a transaction. Some paintings are aimed more carefully at the description of a social environment and types of classifiable individuals in a specific place and specific situation. Others present isolated or distracted figures who can barely sense their inner torment. But it is evident, in any case, how ours and the painter’s perception as we look at the works, the idea of “ill fate” is still evident of men who are continually tossed around by the fate that makes them too aware or unaware from time to time of destiny. People that come and go, now described with explicit realism that takes us back to a cultural climate that bring to mind the great intellectual adventures of the years after World War II in the nineteen-fifties; now with the arcane symbolism of remote French origin, even of the beginnings of the twentieth century that tend to disintegrate the image until the extreme limit of disappearance. But the deep motivations of that continual coming and going of the form have overshadowed the artist himself in an autobiographical text claiming its own specificity in direct conflict with some of the contemporary trends that he felt were distorted and mortifying, the will to say strongly asserts, through the practice of painting, his “joy of belonging to the world.”
Bosco has a long story behind him made up of a continuous search for references that he feels are in tune with his creative horizon, a search that has made him an omnivore even though his style has been well-identified and personal from the beginning and remains strictly autonomous and independent. It seems that for a time Bosco worked “in comparison” with a series of masters of the past, comparing himself sometimes enthusiastically approving, other times almost ironically. He canvasses all the great French paintings from the eighteen- and nineteen-hundreds and some works appear to ostensibly evoke Bonnard, Degas, Renoir, Monet. But then one has the feeling of seeing in him a note that suddenly moves to the heroic Roman school of the nineteen-thirties and to sense the suggestions of Mafai and Scipione; and at the same time it is equally evident how in his imagery he wedges himself in the fascinating American metaphysics of Edward Hopper or Ben Shahn. On closer inspection, Bosco’s figurative culture springs from a continuous transit between the French world and the American world, both folded inside the severe formal structure of a very Italian artist in his adhering to a sort of Renaissance ideal of balance and composure, so as to nullify any other eventual influence. It’s as if Bosco himself relived that Paris-New York axis that in the course of the nineteen-hundreds was one of the most effective lines of communication and exchange of the entire history of Western art. Bosco lives in that line and belongs to that world.
Bosco has had two brushes: one precise and accurate, the other out of focus and trembling that carries out the same reconnaissance as the first, but with a style that tends to go toward disappearance to the re-absorption into the indistinct images. With this method, Bosco has created especially in recent years a real figurative epic mixed with elegy and regret. The result is a significant “series” where every piece naturally connects to another, creating a story in pictures whose plot, however, remains suspended and perhaps unattainable. Bosco on one hand, could be interpreted as a designer who rationally plans a complex and interconnected figurative structure. But on the other hand, he seems to draw the culminating point of his career a sort of poetics of silence and melancholy.
Anyone who observes his works may have the feeling that at the heart of the artist’s interest is the abandonment to “ill fate” burdened by a mystery that overshadows everything. It’s exactly this feeling that prepares the best way to understand a severe and thoughtful art that well expresses the strong personality of a penetrating investigator of the Royal, alert and attentive while observing the waiting threshold where you may be able to see the exact profile stand out of our own sensibility.
Claudio Strinati
