As time passed Roberto Bosco’s singular and very personal narrative talent came out. A talent belonging to an indeed particular narrator who tells, somehow, always the same thing, starting it all over again, absorbed in a world of his own which resembles a sort of Gotham City (the dark city where Batman lives, gradually
developed in the 40s by Bill Finger into the dark metamorphosis of a mutant New York) in which he wanders on and on unable to leave those figurative borders the author awarded to that fantastic place, where the most astonishing adventures happen, yet choked by a strange claustrophobia that gives the idea of the slightest space in which, however, turbulent and dazing events happen.
Bosco’s mark seems to reinvent a gloomy and fascinating tradition, issued by a never-foregone medley between the great American comic and the Italian one, in its narrative and disquieting aspect. It is somehow as if Bosco’s had treasured a series of graphical ideas which allowed him to create, in the course of unforgettable years and perhaps not possible anymore, protagonists of stories and comics consisting of magical splendor and amazing contents. One of the most remote sources, about which it is uncertain if Bosco’s was aware of, could be Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, written in 1931, which ruled the American collective imagination during the fourth and fifth decades of the Twentieth Century, although it went on for a long time onward. It seems then to recognize in Bosco’s a powerful awesomeness which may come from Hugo Pratt’s Colto Maltese, started in 1967 and reaching its climax in the 70s. Yet, as much probable could be the fascination the series of Frank Miller’s Cin City had on the artist, started in 1991 and ended in a great movie in 2005 by Robert Rodriguez with the cooperation of Miller himself and Quentin Tarantino.
Bosco’s paintings, however, never allude to something precise, yet we have a feeling that we are in front of a frequent caller of far away echoes whose figurative sediments are progressively rewritten by a proud and pondering mind who uts situations and characters together abstracting them from whatever truly narrative cue only to freeze them up, on the contrary, over the edge of time and space tending to the indefinite. One is tempted to say that they even tend to disappearance. Here, in this exhibition, are the characters introduced as classical portraits like Celine, Al Pacino, Scorsese, Freud; people who scrutinize the conscience and stays motionless in the darkness of the painting, they too in a phase towards disappearance. There is a lot of American culture, precisely from New York, latent in Bosco’s paintings and the idea of the Triptychs emphasizes this interpretation in a cinematographic vein, but belonging to an America of other times, more suitable to a disappointed Francis Scott Fitzgerald or a Humphrey Bogart on the wane, just rose from Casablanca. And it is exactly the spirit of Humphrey Bogart, ill-tempered and reserved, extremely human yet surly, that seems to sink into the mysterious silhouettes of human beings seen by Bosco always askew or passing by.
These never-manifested events which Bosco seems to tell, don’t start and don’t end since they are only fragments, impulses. It is not well clear if the theme in the background is the indifference, the phlegm, and not maybe a close sorrow, unspeakable, truly bitter, that lies on all the depicted situations and, in the main, on nearly unreal faces. In certain moments we all look like the same, going out of a station or in queues done and undone. Still one wouldn’t call Bosco’s characters metropolitan zombies. Men and women without a face, yet misfits by appearance who on the contrary are clearly men who come and go, the way Umberto Boccioni called them in a crucial period of his career. Boccioni, who is maybe still able to leave messages and solicitations to sensitive and dedicated minds such as Bosco. All arose from the same basis. A basis that, however, could correspond to the unknowable meant like something that can be represented but not explained and inspected, otherwise we would give way to an insurmountable contradiction, hidden maybe; in any case an extreme outcome of our author’s fervid creativity.
