Piergiovanni Bubani is an artist who has spent his life on the research, improvement and the visual impact of his works of art. From his impulsive and brutal manner of dealing with a canvas emerge the images as if from the unconscious, which he then shows
BUBANI IS A PAINTER AND OCCASIONAL SCULPTOR. IN THE 1980S HE BECAME POPULAR WITH HIS FIRST SOLO SHOWS AT THE PATIO AND LOGGETTA LOMBARDESCA IN RAVENNA. Continually moving and seeking new forms of expression, the artist was invited to important collective exhibitions in London, the Netherlands, Germany and even in Patagonia by critics of the calibre of P.Restany, L.Smith, C.Spadoni, F.Solmi, F.Farina and G.R. Manzoni. He had great success with his exhibition “Dell’oro e del buio” (Of gold and of the dark), where he explored the infinite possibilities of light, dark and its interplay, breaking through black and revealing light like a defeated Prometheus looking for the truth. His painting is light and fire, as Beatrice Buscaroli wrote in her passionate criticism: «Between “placing” and “raising”, believing and doubting, between the yellow of light and the yellow of fire, between the skeleton of a cross and it being painted stands Pier Giovanni Bubani, one of the most talented artists of this century who has seen everything and deleted everything. He is in a timeless world where an ancient fire burns, a fire standing for every fire, every burn, every laceration. Bubani excavates canvases and sheets of paper and fills them. Painting and sculpture grow together, as though we need an extremely brief summary of what has been, from Fontana to Burri, from the wound to its blood… that red, that gold, where has it come from? The mystery of Bubani’s work comes from the foundations. You don’t know if the fire comes first or after, you don’t know if red or gold are decoration or blood. Most importantly you don’t know where the foundations begin. They emerge from a dark cavern of blacks or from neutral light-coloured paper like the pages of a medieval manuscript, they emerge and express forms from history, nature, religion. A sort of automatic writing that crosses through his body and his mind and through the body of the painting in an incomprehensible exchange of pushes that only at the end will come to a truce. It pushes from inside the fire, pushes from above the pale yellow of the resurrection. And these signs, which seem to originate from a secret and forgotten archaeology, are available to him. As though they naturally found the road they were seeking, naturally disposed to decorate, decorate themselves, to form an understandable discourse. To construct a minute, extremely fragile and immediate beauty that may only last a second.»
On Saturday, 25th July, there was the opening of the Pirgiovanni Bubani’ exhibition at the Yacht Club DC of Mirco Dellapasqua, situated in the Marinara in Marina di Ravenna which over the years has held exhibitions of the major artists like Gabriella Benedini, Tommaso Cascella, Mind, Umberto Mariani, Tino Stefanoni, Keih Harinf, Marco Neri, Bruno Ceccobelli and Sergio Sarri.
(Pier Giovanni Bubani, light and fire – Barchemagazine.com – September 2015)
