"What do Bruno Pinto’s paintings evoke in the viewer ?
What intellectual and emotional processes do they set in motion?
What is the core of the aesthetic experience that comes from the contact with his works?
Pinto’s work solicits and is primarily solicited by 'protomental' processes! [… ] With the term protomental Bion refers to a series of processes in which intellectual functions and body activity are mixed together. It deals of the first mental organizations that derive directly from the information given by their own bodies. [… ] For example, the process of 'retaining and ejecting' which are originally physiological processes, as they refer to real exchanges between organism and environment. [… ] In this borderland between body and mind, kinesthetic experiences (tactile and muscular) play a fundamental role. [… ]
Separating the figure from the background is one of the most important acts of the experience of knowledge. In the case of Bruno we realize that this theme, together with other protomentals, becomes fundamental, it means that this practice is also proposed as a poetic of the 'Knowledge'. [… ]
Pinto’s work imposes both a spatial and temporal reading of the events represented. In other words, these works cannot be fully grasped unless the viewer, almost entering the picture, on the one hand does not run sequentially, in temporal succession, the chromatic spaces represented passing from one area to the next (temporal reading) and on the other hand, do not implement a perception of a global type in which all spatial events are somehow contemporary (spatial reading). [… ] In fact, in Pinto’s work the theme of the figure-background relationship acquires a particular meaning. Separating an object from its context means not only acknowledging it intellectually, but giving it birth, giving it existence.
[… ] We could say that the important nucleus of poetry is in the representation of spatial events that establish dialectically changing relationships between them.
In fact, the viewer is asked to different readings of protomental events (different relationships between containers and contents: different relationships between figures and backgrounds etc.) […].
In this way the restless and unstable dynamics of spatial relations, after a complex and articulated perceptual path, reassembles itself in a higher level of organization, another exponential meaning.
Pinto’s work, in conclusion, automatically produces protomental processes but also critically redefines them in a new dimension of knowledge.
But the discourse is circular: knowledge is the dynamic propellant for new creative experiences in search of protomental spaces."
Vezio Ruggeri, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Opere dal 1953 al 1987, edited by Claudio Cerritelli, introduction by Filippo Sassoli dè Bianchi, with notes by Enrico Cesare Gori, Concetto Pozzati, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Bandini, Vezio Ruggeri, Giuseppe Dossetti, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987 cit., p. 50