The urban scene and humanity that Roberto Bosco lives constitute that common thread that links his recent works. It’s a difficult relationship, trodden many times by art, cinema, poetry, music and literature. It’s because of this that trying ones’ hand at it is already a challenge in itself, a retracing of roads and themes that marked a good part of the art of the nineteen-hundreds.
There is no rhetoric in Bosco’s works, nor any seemingly underlying quotations.
The humanity that walks in the city more or less definably (Figures in the Metropolis; Figure nella metropolis, 2008) immediately brings the power of the Fourth State (Quarto Stato) of Pelizza da Volpedo to mind; not only French Impressionism of the late eighteen-hundreds, but also the neo-realist cinema of the nineteen-seveties, from Rossellini to De Sica. The figures then seem to get confused in the delicate and pictorial monochromes of black and white of the masters of Italian photography, from Carlo Di Palma to Peppino Rotunno.
Bosco concentrates on a silent mass of humanity that never looks the viewer in the eye, that seems to accept a state of surrender, of laconic indetermination. In The Anonymous (gli Anonimi, 2006), the approach of the theme is very cinematic: Bosco’s eye cleverly approaches the middle of the crowd getting off of a street car, and you can’t help but think about the movements of the camera on set- the long arm of the dolly that lowers the film camera from above to an exact point of a scene, inside a conversation, a small particular that a few seconds before we would never have expected. Bosco in this case arrives in front of a man with a beige jacket and blue dress shirt, his head down, the air thoughtful, and beside him other characters that are absorbed in their thoughts, but visibly tired, almost shattered. The scene could take place in the nineteen-sixties-the hats of the men and women bring this period to mind. We could be in the spring because everyone is wearing light jackets, yet they seem to feel the cold of a winter evening in Milan.
But this is the strength of Bosco’s works, the sense of empathy that they convey, making the viewer want to enter even further into the scene, just like in a film. We would like to talk to the lady with the hat on the right, to the character who is wearing a brimmed hat and striped jacket that precedes the protagonist, and of course to the figure in the foreground. Bosco, on the other hand, is also a noted author and director of radio comedies. This narrative vein of his comes through his paintings naturally and with simplicity.
Painting and photography, harmonizing the latter with a cinematic sense, continuously interact in Bosco’s recent works and determine strong chromatic differences of light that more or less define the figures in the scene and the perception of space that they achieve. In the Metropolitan Image (Immagine metropolitana, 2007), there is always a crowd that approaches us and brushes up against us, like in any walk through the city. But the man with the hat, the women from behind with the red and blue dresses, like the city around them, is undetermined and clearly impressionist. Everything blends into color like a skillful blur in the scene of a film that preludes another or constitutes a moment of suspension in the story.
Now it couldn’t be anything other than Paris the privileged scenery of Bosco’s characters, and the tracking shot of paintings that is seen in the scene constitutes a passionate homage to the city that has inspired artists of the world more than any other for at least two centuries. Bosco naturally doesn’t put himself in competition with Degas, Manet, or Courbet, the great fathers of modern color-we’ll leave them at the Musée d’Orsay- but he confirms the right and pleasure, above all, of interacting with the great masters of the city of lights to draw out an original and interesting language.
On the other hand, art in all of its fields, the new always comes from the study and comprehension of who has preceded us, and the revising with ingenuity and maturity forms and styles of the recent and remote past-the engine of creativity, broadly speaking. In music, especially jazz, improvisation wouldn’t exist if it weren’t based on so-called standards, the basic pieces on which all musicians elaborate their own creative line.
Bosco elaborates the great standards- be it allowed to say- of French painting with a creative freedom that often comes close to the modus operandi of jazz artists- improvising develops more or less quickly into a melody, and proposes original visions that always point to an objective of a silent humanity, of which we are not authorized to violate its intimacy and so-called privacy, as it is called today.
In The Man Who Looks (l’uomo che guarda, 2008) the standard is naturally the Absinthe of Degas, the painting that perhaps more than the Mona Lisa of Leonardo da Vinci-but for less time, having been painted in 1876-stimulates the chords of artists all over the globe, and not just painters. Nevertheless, Bosco approaches this monument of art of all time with subtle gentleness, changing the point of view. It’s no longer us looking at the drinkers, but it’s the regular customer of the bar that looks around- and the entire approach of the scene as a consequence. It’s as if we were seated next to Ellen Andree and Marcellin Desboutin on a Parisian afternoon at the end of the eighteen-hundreds, looking to see what’s going on in the street. Bosco imagines a rainy day with people from behind-all of them-that hide beneath their umbrellas, while the character-onlooker rests his elbow on the same table like Degas, maybe in that same local. But this time the marble top with empty glasses goes toward a crowded square and not inside the local, not inside the lives of the characters absorbed in alcohol.
The Man Who Looks (l’uomo che guarda) is a painting that in reality doesn’t suggest a dangerous parallel, but makes one understand how in the moment in which someone has something to say about a classic painting-or about any work of human creation-the result is then noteworthy. In Figure in Red and Gray (Figura in rosso e in grigio, 2007) the style register changes again, leaving space for the incomplete or for the desired minimalism in the use of color. There’s only one feminine silhouette in red, from behind, that we can suppose is a sensual woman. The rest are figures that are lost in the air, shadows that approach the viewer only to brush up against him as usual.
A color spread out on big backgrounds, with strokes of a spatula more than a brush and with an acute material and luministic sense, is the trait that characterizes works like Paris (2007) or The Embrace (l’Abbraccio, 2008) where we find ourselves increasingly immersed in the estranged subconscious of real or imagined cities, in scenes that restore the latent and mutual estrangement that is cultivated in urban contexts.
Works like Girl with the Socks (Ragazza con i calzini, 2006) seem to have been created a long time from the most recent productions, and yet in this case we’re only one or two years from the corpus investigated so far. Here the figure is sketched out patiently and meticulously through a golden light and above all a rarefied atmosphere that is not unfamiliar to the painting of Donghi, of a magical realism revisited and simplified in its stroke, but efficient in its final outcome. The same material and structural feeling of the painting is found again in the The Drinker (Bevitrice) and The Meeting (l’Incontro), works that bring Guttuso to mind, a sculptural taste of dense overlapping and iridescent coloring. Two happy episodes of the last phase are Roofs of Paris (Tetti di Parigi, 2008) and Montmartre (2009), where Bosco moderates himself with a rigorous and geometric register in the most classic Parisian scenes. The roofs seen from the attics become an opportunity to use a repertoire or simple joints of lines and angles in a kaleidoscopic and minimal vision through which Bosco knows how to still adhere to reality.
Figures in Gray (Figure in grigio) and Pigalle (both 2009) are two testimonies to Bosco’s chameleon style, incredibly different from one another for works done in such a short time from each other. The first is a showpiece of the use of light; an intense beam that comes from the right side of the scene that fully hits the silhouettes of men in ties that walk down the street; an intense white light illuminates one side of the figures giving them a solemn tone that is reminiscent of certain sketches of Sironi. On the right, the cyclist figure constitutes a recurring image for Bosco, declined in other works as a sort of Fellini apparition. Pigalle is perhaps that work that seems to be inspired by film more than the others; the profile of a man with round glasses peeps out from the right side of the scene where you see a street of the renowned Parisian neighborhood in the rain. He looks like an extra that didn’t realize that he walked in front of the film camera, or a curious person who come into the camera’s view of the painter for a moment, peeking inside it. The scene opens up, the painting is no longer an insurmountable perimeter in two dimensions, but an open space, an intricacy of colors that comes to life and that you can touch with your hand.
