23 july 2009 | VIA DI CITTà, 111 SIENA
23 july – 9 august 2009
Alfonso Bonavita’s solo exhibition “Umani limiti”.
Alfonso Bonavita was born in Amantea in 1962. He lives and works in Genoa. Around the mid-90s, he began his exhibition journey which led him to create important wall decorations and monumental public sculptures. His works have also been the subject of numerous personal and collective exhibitions in prestigious art galleries and public spaces. Paintings and sculptures in bronze and steel will be presented. The works analyze and stage, through the representation of sporting activity, man’s continuous struggle against his own mental and physical limits. The sculptures are characterized by the pathos and emotion typical of sport. They have a pyramidal composition, where the uppermost part is also the smallest, tiny heads, disproportionate compared to enormous and looming limbs, and they are released into space with serious serenity, producing a slight sense of imbalance and imbalance. What the artist wants to represent with these apparently sporty and athletic figures but nailed to the force of gravity is the widespread social discomfort of recent times: thus, contemporary man is in continuous movement, but does not care to really understand the the other, his culture and the meaning of existence. The bodies represented, provocatively ugly, are in contrast with the contemporary society dedicated only to appearance, and tell the story of the discomfort of the different, the excluded, forced to the margins of a society that rejects what it has failed to homogenize. The plastic sense of this artist allows him a three-dimensional reading of paintings too, which compared to sculptures are more a reflection on movement, on form and on the symbolic value of physical effort. Bonavita’s works, based on the contrast between situations, between desire and reality, between utopia and destiny, force the viewer to walk around them, to observe them in every nook and cranny, to make the various elements play together and to seek their balance. The catalog “Alfonso Bonavita – Human limits” is edited by Luca Beatrice.