"[… ] In his painting deliberately not planned, in the unstable and saturated space of his paintings where shapes live in constant uncertainty, in precarious equilibrium, is the constant and unslackening tension of the artist trying to undertake reality, understanding its inner and original reasons to manage to know it, and not only to represent or to interpret it.
An ancient and huge commitment that has involved the man before the artist, assuming in Pinto total and totalizing terms.
I believe that his troubled private story should be read in this lines, in his sudden abandonment in the early 60’s of painting and of every relationship until then lived, to get lost in a countryside, isolated and marginalized by contemporary times; to get to know in his own fundamental nature.
After such a strong experience, any return is not possible, for him, different from a new relocation in the world, even with regard to his own painting. [… ]
In the works that Pinto paints, after this troubled beginning, the action of the artist is directed to experiment a possible new pictorial language, to try to 'invent' a representation of an experience, such that his expressive realization immediately coincides with the perception of what he tries to represent.
The central problem therefore becomes to free oneself from the epidemic misunderstanding of the phenomena, from the easy confusions of the key terms of its relationship with the world (vital/vitalistic, fantasy/reverie, superficial impression/perception) to reach the truth (the essence) of nature, its secret figure, where the heart of reality beats.
The starting point for the painter consists in the elements through which he experiences the external reality: space, objects, light. [… ]
It is also significant as this dialectic/opposition of ideas, is admirably expressed by Pinto in an article published in 1979 in the most prestigious magazine of Italian pedagogy entitled L’arte come scoperta del bambino a se stesso (Art as a discovery of the child to himself); once again in great harmony with the thinking and artistic activity of his time he seeks the origins, the primacy, the initial essence of the manifestation of painting, and writes: 'A vast network of images produced by the human will continually affects our eye, which selects, separates, associates, overlaps them, and synthesizes automatically; likewise automatically impulses, feelings, thoughts, and actions, come from these aroused images.
But what does our eye consciously see? How much do we evaluate what is proposed by seeing? [… ]; our eye is not at all free, it is conditioned by culture. ' (in 'The problems of pedagogy'- 1 January 1979 ).
Another contradiction, therefore, a tribute to the culture of belonging that only apparently seems to question the trust of the gift of the artist; an apparent contradiction that is the witness of consciously living the mental and cultural conflict that Pinto testifies, once again, […].
A radical revision of the cognitive schemes that, according to the example of Pinto, can certainly be made, perhaps not exclusively but certainly with the exercise of the art, as a choice not only of 'craft' or poetic-aesthetic, but as a life choice, deeply and humbly moral and existential at the same time."
Silvia Evangelisti, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Luoghi Controversi del cuore, edited by Silvia Evangelisti, with comments by Bruno Bandini, Andrea Emiliani, Silvia Evangelisti, Flaminio Gualdoni, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Pinto. Pinacoteca Comunale, Ravenna - Palazzo Ducale, Urbino - Galleria Civica, Modena 1990, cit., p. 49
Silvia Evangelisti, in Cat. Pinto. edited by Silvia Evangelisti, with contributions by Andrea Emiliani, Silvia Evangelisti, Flaminio Gualdoni, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, Bologna, December 1991, cit., p. 49