Jean Soldini, 2010

 «The values of painting are not

to be found in its expressive potential,

just like the essence of mankind

is not in his merely psychic existence» [2]

           "The heart of Bruno Pinto’s work is the relationship between the existing fighting the ghosts and the illusion we are prey and protagonists of. Painting is the way to understand something in a radically antignostic sense. It is a matter of following the path of a becoming painting, of making itself matter, form, colour of the existing being of matter, form and colour on the most different stages. Become painting, as breach in the existing becoming process. Our hand on the stone explores its volume, touches that table, its surface, the thickness. That stone, that table, are such only becoming and becoming once again stone and table, whose limit is constantly ditched and resumed. Edge of the table, there, where it ends and resumes, grip by looking for it, rubbing it with your limit, it being ditched and resumed as well. [...] Limit is never a closed border, this allow us to rub thing with things, that are thoughts, impulses, volitions, fantasies, chaotic “internal” motion to be preserved in its factual liveliness, with no analytic dissociations, no dialectic operation so that it enjoys and hurts in the truthful collision between bodies. “Internal” and “external” liveliness, in a single becoming, where uniqueness getting in touch can, beyond vagueness and romance, take to a being-with, to a being together the resistance to what it is and to the non-intellectualistic responsibility, not idealized in its confrontations. It is in the persistence of this exercise that ghosts, hallucinations, enchantments both personal and collective can be downsized.

         Bruno Pinto experienced his first powerful and lasting suggestions observing Giotto, , Masaccio, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Van Gogh, Courbet e Cézanne, the “modern miracle”, as, tells us the artist, “ Cezanne has no style”.[3]. There was then an approach, suddenly acting deeply and freely, to Guttuso, with the peremptory tension of the skin of his volumes, and to Severini, with his dissociation of the shapes, reassembled in centripetal – centrifugal tractions. The artist was marginally affected by the informal climate prevailing in Italy around 1954-1955, even though it appears connected to the latter by virtue of its rough and overflowing material extensions of light, rain and dust. The Informal is based on a liberation of sign and matter which is the purest and most direct proof of existence; sign and matter without end, neither for the form nor for its negation. [...] In Lucio Fontana as well, the concept is gesture. Gesture not only conceptual, but existence that the canvas cannot factually - ideally contain in its doing space. Liberation of existence through the existing. This is not Pinto’s problem. This is the limit-existence which is form-matter, intensity-colour of that form-matter to be experimented in painting in a becoming limit against limit. Become rubbing that never stabilizes, with a continuous dislocation of the border, of the line that is point of contact between one piece and the other of the existing.Point of suture, cut, never truncation and in no case sealing blocker. Cut, distantiae producer (‘distances’ and ‘differences’) during rubbing, in the friction from where surfaces arise, with their dimensions, with their weight. There in the middle – among surfaces having different intensities, among cracks and corrugations – there is rain, sun, dust. Up there, there is rain, sun, dust in a painting that is territory of desire. [...] The desire, which is expressed in this multitude of dilations, is a proliferation of caresses as vigilant bewilderment in the “being together” always and too quickly restrained by the neurotic intimation of possession and mastery. Lévinas says that “what is caressed is not, strictly speaking, touched. It is not the sweet softness or the warmth of the hand conveyed in a contact that the caress seeks. This search of the caress constitutes its essence, because the caress does not know what it is looking for. This “not knowing”, this fundamental confusion is its essential character».

Caress does not know what it is looking for, it goes beyond any intention to touch. [...]

          In Pinto’s vision you can find the assumption of the hell that we ourselves create with our will to be almighty. There is breathe with no system of our own anguish [7]; there is as well the joy coming from a freedom gained in the boundaries with an existing that has not been made to stop at the feet of the ideas. In its becoming painting, it implies, using the words of Georges Braque, that the painting is finished when «he has erased the idea». On this route lies the peculiarity of Bruno Pinto, indifferent to all current events, careless of all contemporaries, pursuing the picture as an erased idea plus the anguish plus the joy in trying to incarnate so as not to hide behind the spirit or behind the body.

          [...] Here the meaning of the Pintian exercise is fully clarified. Desire is the production of caresses beyond touching and owning, as lucid loss of orientation in “being together”. The obsession opposites caress, and its prerogative that is to be expected of a «pure future, without content», always other, «without project or plan». [...] Painting, embodiment exercises, letting oneself fall in terms of caressing, with greater modesty when what faces us and offer oneself is the female body. [...] Caress, vision of friction and “assembly” of vision in the intervals - passages between one area and the other in the painting, generated by them. Intervals-passages, faults that are simultaneously the path of the fingers, at times lines straightened by the distance; and then again vision, by retouching a picture over the years, and sometimes modifying it sensibly. [...]".

©  Jean Soldini, Lugano, June 2010.