Critic texts

“The values of painting do not lie in its
expressive possibilities, just as the essence
of man is not found in his
merely psychic existence” [2]

“The heart of Bruno Pinto’s work is the relationship with the existing against the phantoms and illusionism of which we are both prey and protagonists. Painting is the means to understand something in a radically anti-gnostic sense. It is a matter of following the path of a becoming-painting, of a becoming-matter, form, and color of the existing in its being matter, form, and color on the most diverse planes. Becoming-painting as a passage into becoming-existent. Our hand on the stone explores its volume, touches that table, its supporting surface, the thickness of the latter. That stone, that table are such only by becoming and re-becoming stone and table with a threshold always undone and remade. The edge of the table where it ends and resumes, adherence to the latter by seeking it, rubbing against it with one’s own boundary, which is also always undone and remade. […] The limit is never a closed frontier; it is that thanks to which we can rub things against things that are also thoughts, impulses, volitions, fantasies, a chaotic ‘inner’ motion to be preserved in its factual vitality, without analytical dissociations, without dialectical operations, so that it may rejoice and suffer in the truthful collision between bodies. ‘Inner’ and ‘outer’ vitality of a single becoming in which singularities placed in intensive contact can, beyond genericity and romanticism, lead to being-with, to being together with the resistance of what is and to a non-intellectualized, non-idealized responsibility towards it. It is in the insistence of this exercise that phantoms, hallucinations, and enchantments—always personal and collective—can be put into perspective.”

Bruno Pinto experienced his first powerful and lasting influences by looking at Giotto, Masaccio, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Van Gogh, Courbet, and Cézanne, ‘the modern miracle’ because, the painter tells us, ‘Cézanne has no Style'[3]. There was then an approach, which soon acted with depth and maximum freedom, to Guttuso with the peremptory tension of the skin of his volumes, and to Severini with his dissociation of forms reassociated in centripetal-centrifugal tractions. The artist was marginally affected by the Informal climate widespread in Italy around 1954-1955, although appearing linked to the latter by virtue of his material extensions, rough and overflowing with light, rain, and dust. The Informal is based on a liberation of sign and matter that is the purest and most direct possible attestation of existence; sign and matter without end, neither for form nor for its negation. […] Even in Lucio Fontana, the concept is gesture. A gesture that is not only conceptual, but an existence that the canvas cannot factually-ideally contain in its making space. Liberation of existence by traversing the existing. This is not Pinto’s problem. His problem is the limit-existence that is form-matter, the intensity-color of that form-matter to be experienced in painting in a becoming limit against limit. Becoming a never-stabilized rubbing, with a continuous dislocation of the boundary, of the line that is the point of contact between one piece of the existing and another. A point of suture, a cut, never a truncation and in no case a blocking weld. A cut, the production of distantiae (‘distances’ and ‘differences’) in the rubbing, in the friction from which surfaces arise with their dimensions, with their weight. In the middle—between surfaces of different intensities, between cracks and ripples—there is rain, sun, dust. Upon it, there is rain, sun, dust in a painting that is the territory of desire. […] Desire, which is expressed in this multitude of dilations, is a proliferation of caresses as a vigilant bewilderment in ‘being together,’ always and too rapidly hindered by the neuroticizing intimation of possession and mastery. Lévinas says that ‘what is caressed is not, strictly speaking, touched. It is not the soft smoothness or the warmth of the hand given in contact that the caress seeks. This seeking of the caress constitutes its essence because the caress does not know what it seeks. This “not knowing,” this fundamental confusion, is its essential character.’

The caress does not know what it seeks; it goes beyond any intention of touching. […]

In Pinto’s painting, there is an acceptance of the hell that we ourselves create with our will to omnipotence. There is a breath without a system of one’s own anguish [7]; there is also the joy deriving from a freedom conquered within the constraints of an existing that is not made to stop at the feet of ideas. In its becoming-painting, it implies, in the words of Georges Braque, that the painting is finished the moment it ‘has erased the idea.’ Along this course, the peculiarity of Bruno Pinto has emerged, indifferent to any current trend, unconcerned with all contemporaneity, pursuing the painting as an erased idea plus anguish plus joy in the attempt to incarnate himself so as not to hide behind the spirit or behind the body.

[…] The meaning of the Pintian exercise is fully clarified here. Desire is the production of caresses beyond touching and possessing, like a lucid loss of orientation in ‘being together.’ Obsession opposes the caress and its prerogative, which is to be the expectation of a ‘pure future, without content,’ always other, ‘without project or plan.’ […] Painting, exercises of incarnation, letting oneself fall, which is caressing, with greater modesty when the female body faces us and offers itself. […] Caress, vision of friction and ‘montage’ of vision in the intervals-passages between one area of the painting and another, generated by them. Intervals-passages, faults that are simultaneously the path of the fingers, sometimes lines straightened by distance; and then vision again, returning to a painting even over the years and modifying it, sometimes significantly. […]”

© Jean Soldini, Lugano, June 2010.

“The dramatic function of drawing—that intensity dense with lacerations, agglutinations, and symbolic functions identifiable in Bruno Pinto’s black and white works on paper—is transferred in his more recent work into plastic hypotheses, into sculptures with a vague archaic flavor. […]
The seeker of medieval harmonies spent an entire existence searching for the trace of divinity in an image. This procedure, so difficult and one to which we are no longer accustomed, can still live and undoubtedly serve; and then, art is approached with that serene but tremendous seriousness that was characteristic of it in certain periods.
Pinto uses an analogous procedure, and these primordial sculptures, bathed in the elementary, are an example of it. I believe they should live precisely in the uncertainty of the materials that compose them; for, in my view, the absolute can be something intermittent—like mythical thought—an electrical discharge that a priori rejects apparent completeness. […] The inevitable grandeur of living
‘Can therefore produce dreams, imbalances that for a moment suspend uncertainty and find peace, but it also generates chasms that lead us to perdition.
Like the soul sent into space by Omar Khayyam, which returns to the poet saying ‘I am heaven and I am hell’.”

Bruno Bandini, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Luoghi Controversi del cuore, edited by Silvia Evangelisti, with writings by Bruno Bandini, Andrea Emiliani, Silvia Evangelisti, Flaminio Gualdoni, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, Bologna 1990, cit. p. 11

“[…] In an age in which engaging directly with a work seems truly difficult, and we continue to avoid looking the person we are speaking with in the eye, a model of interpretation must nevertheless re-emerge which, like a hermeneutic probe, can allow us to delve into the surface of the painting. The great ideologies have collapsed, their reflections on the autonomy of art have faded completely, and the voice of poetry can perhaps return to perform without being insulted by accusations of ‘formalism’.
I believe that this is a very significant moment for every genre of poetry, for a great humanistic pedagogy that can teach our affluent civilization which great path to follow. Probably the same one that the world of poverty had laboriously taught us, through centuries and centuries of traditions, generations, and even intellectual customs.
Why these reflections before the work of Bruno Pinto?
[…] I would now like to reflect on the problem of matter and how I attempted to approach it, as Pinto seems to have done. […] And without forgetting that a very complex, but ultimately prevailing line, which rose toward our years from the origins of modern civilization, carried within itself, if not recognizability, certainly spatiality, the total freedom of the landscape. […] The landscape had suddenly replaced the old, millennial macrocosm of symbols and metaphors, of concepts and liturgical notions: the modern landscape, where the new relationship between man and nature was to be established as a lesson in freedom, harmony, and pacification. […]
Ultimately, much of the disintegration of the central form that our century has attempted to carry out is obstinately recomposed in the truth of various spatial forms. For this reason, I have spoken of a constant, coherent feeling for space in the work of this artist, as if from the height of the perspective telescope it were still possible—by varying the focus—to return to figurative reality: and with it, before and even higher than it, that pacification of the difficult relationship that man still maintains today, more than ever, with nature and things.
The decomposition of the central form signifies, as in the first pages of Serenus Zeitblom’s childhood education in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus.
Sand, a drop, heliotropy, ice crystals: ‘… are they models or are they imitations of plant forms?’. The answer was logical and at the same time fantastic, and it serves us too as we look together at Pinto’s work: ‘Neither one nor the other,’ he must have answered himself; ‘they are parallel formations. Creative and dreaming nature has the same dream here and there and, if it is permissible to speak of imitation, this can only be mutual’.”

Andrea Emiliani, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Luoghi Controversi del cuore, edited by Silvia Evangelisti, with writings by Bruno Bandini, Andrea Emiliani, Silvia Evangelisti, Flaminio Gualdoni, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, Bologna 1990, cit., p. 7

Andrea Emiliani, 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. 7

“[…] This is a painting of light; it is a painting of glory. I have never seen an exhibition so powerful, so intense; it is a painting that recounts the mystery of light, […].
I have not seen such a beautiful exhibition in twenty years. By now, everything in art has become homogenized and is no longer understood; we no longer understand anything because we no longer possess the culture of either humility or research. Art is the most tempting attempt of man’s impotence; it is man’s most tempting attempt to cross the threshold of the limit, and it is visible to see if it is possible to turn a rainbow, a bridge toward that which is not possible.
The first cultural experience I encountered in this exhibition was this: this painting has finally granted me what I call the mystery of flight; in this dry and arid air, our wings are once again ready to fly thanks to you. Thank you.”

Carmine Benincasa, speech at the exhibition Bruno Pinto. Dopo il Silenzio, curated by Peter Weiermaier, with contributions by Massimo Cacciari and Valerio Dehò, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna 2003.

“[…] Those who refuse to conform to trends are cut out of the debate and are no longer considered.
He is one of the few cases in Italy, and indeed outside of Italy, where the artist’s late work is his strongest.
This is likely because he is an intellectual who has been in conflict with the market: he has worked almost entirely without the market, without its dangers and the constraints of art infrastructures. […]
Observing the work of Bruno, who is a young old man—certainly young when he speaks and when he thinks—it is truly rare for a painter to also be an intellectual; it is true that he is an intellectual. Reflecting upon himself, Pinto rightly remarks that experience is fundamental to painting.
Pinto has created a late body of work of great relevance, great beauty, and great quality.”

Peter Weiermaier, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Dopo il Silenzio, edited by Peter Weiermaier, with contributions by Massimo Cacciari and Valerio Dehò, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna 2003.

“I have known your work as an artist for a long time and I hold it in high esteem: I was pleased to have confirmation of what I think; it is guided (or at least entails) a lucid critical vision. […] Hegel understood the incompatibility of art with the hegemonic bourgeoisie.
The painting you produce (fortunately) still seeks value; it believes in intersubjective communication. The difficult compatibility with industrial technology was dialectical; the incompatibility with the mass information system is total, brutal, and lethal. […] With post-modernism, it died and went to hell.”
(Giulio Carlo Argan, 1992)

“[…] Pinto is in search of a knowledge yet to be constructed, or at least to be fully elaborated. The sources of this unmanifest (or barely manifest) knowledge are of three types: the anthropology of the ancient or primitive world, which in rituals and myths reveals ideas that contemporaries have lost; esotericism, or wisdom culture, which reveals hidden universes of knowledge; and psychoanalysis, which recovers repressed ideas hidden from the surface in the depths of consciousness. […] He attempts to grapple with the ideas, culture, processes, and inspiration of other artists—regarded by all as fundamental to contemporary art—to derive insights and comparisons beneficial to his own artistic experience […].
In the collected writings, one will find highly original and sometimes counter-current assessments of many ‘sacred monsters’ of modern art. […] I find it of extraordinary interest to be able to see firsthand, through the artist’s own statements, the path leading to the formation of ‘his’ poetic experience. […] Pinto never hides having started from a condition of illiteracy, or rather from the resetting of the notions he previously possessed. One can read (as I did, with great admiration) the beautiful pages of the life Pinto chose to lead during a certain period of his existence, harmonizing his thoughts, daily actions, and common sensations. In conclusion, I can say that for me, the relationship with Pinto’s writing has been an enriching experience. Conflictual at times, shared at others.
Never banal. Just as any attempt to enter, both mentally and instinctively, an artistic experience whose profound value is perceived from the very surface is certainly not banal.”

Omar Calabrese, in Per uscire dalla Valle. Critica di me stesso, edited by Omar Calabrese, La Casa Usher, Ponte alle Grazie Editori, Florence, 1992

“[…] In his deliberately non-conceptual painting, in the unstable and saturated space of his canvases where forms live in constant uncertainty, in a precarious balance, lies the artist’s constant and unyielding tension in search of experiencing reality, understanding its internal and original reasons in order to know it, and not just represent or interpret it.
An ancient and enormous commitment that involved the man even before the artist and was assumed, by Pinto, in total and all-encompassing terms.
In this sense, I believe, his troubled private history must be read: his sudden abandonment in the early 1960s of painting and of every relationship experienced until then, to lose himself in an isolated countryside marginalized from contemporary time; to know himself in his own fundamental nature.
After such a powerful experience, no return is possible for him that is not a refounding of his own way of being in the world, including in relation to his own painting.” […]
In the works that Pinto painted after this troubled beginning, the artist’s action is aimed at experimenting with a possible new pictorial language, at attempting to ‘invent’ a representation of an experience, such that its expressive realization coincides immediately with the perception of what he seeks to represent. The central problem thus becomes that of freeing oneself from the epidemic misunderstanding of phenomena, from the easy confusion of the key terms of his relationship with the world (vital/vitalistic, fantasy/daydreaming, superficial impression/perception) in order to reach the truth (the essence) of nature, its secret code, where the deep heart of reality beats.
The starting points for the painter are the elements through which he experiences external reality: space, the object, light. […]
On the other hand, it is significant how this dialectic/opposition of ideas is admirably expressed by Pinto in an article published in 1979 in the most prestigious Italian pedagogy journal entitled Art as the Child’s Discovery of Self; once again in great harmony with the artistic thinking and practice of his time, he seeks the origins, the primarity, the initial essence of the manifestation of painting, and writes: ‘A very dense network of images produced by human will continuously strikes our eye, which automatically chooses, separates, associates, overlaps, and synthesizes them; equally automatically, impulses, feelings, thoughts, and actions are aroused by these images. But what does our eye see consciously? How much do we evaluate what is proposed through seeing? […]; our eye is not at all free, but rather conditioned by culture.’ (in ‘I problemi della Pedagogia’ – n.1 January 1979). Another contradiction, then, a tribute to the culture of belonging that only apparently seems to question the trust in the artist’s gift; an apparent contradiction that is the testimony of consciously living the mental and cultural conflict that Pinto bears witness to, once again, […].
A radical revision of cognitive patterns which, following Pinto’s example, can certainly be achieved—perhaps not exclusively, but certainly through the practice of art—as a choice that is not merely ‘professional’ or poetic-aesthetic, but as a life choice, profoundly and humbly moral and existential at the same time.”

Silvia Evangelisti, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Luoghi Controversi del cuore, edited by Silvia Evangelisti, with writings 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

“The current crisis in abstract painting arises from the difficulty of reconciling its strictly formal level with the fullness of feeling pursued by emotional painting.

The work of Bruno Pinto, among the most incisive to be seen, acknowledges the conflict between these two tendencies and compels them into works of a perceptual intensity worthy of an Arshile Gorky or a De Stael. If the unfolding of the mark recalls the pained and uneasy lines of Van Gogh, the masterful resolution of the painting’s texture achieves values—also in terms of color—that evoke recurring and irreducible mysterious forms.

The work of Bruno Pinto immediately plunges us into the most authentic truth of painting itself: into that endless search for the meaning of our existence in which great Art, whatever it may be, finds its resolution.”

Mark di Suvero, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Paintings. Sutton Gallery, New York, September 1981

“[…] What immediately impressed me was your reference to human experiences, to your own personal life path, rather than to that aesthetic ‘problematic’ that seems to exhaust the interests of young artists or aspiring artists, even those whose greatest commitment is to distinguish themselves as ‘avant-garde’. […] It seems to me that your fortune (forgive me for saying so) lies in the fact that you have a human experience and not just a cultural one in the specific and, for me, limiting sense; you have suffered and given yourself up for lost, you have reacted extremistically, you know the seasons and the plants, and birth and growth and death, you have observed different so-called developed and elementary societies, you know the value of work, the conditions of independence and those of coexistence, and culture seems to me to have been a series of moments in which you sought to recapitulate your inquiry in the fire of other experiences. In your paintings and drawings, I seemed to see something burning, nakedly presented with a form that is intrepid yet at the same time reserved and contained, like someone who knows that every opening is perilous, that every vision has its toil and its painful history, but one cannot give up […].
Those who achieve the capacity to express themselves or to think cannot fail to have completed the process by which expression or thought acquire individual and disinterested life, detach themselves from the empirical subject and the contingent author, become universalized, and the protagonist himself cannot cast out that part of himself that has crossed the limit of the ego […].”

Correspondence, in Per uscire dalla Valle. Critica di me stesso, edited by Omar Calabrese, La Casa Usher, Florence, 1992

“I thank you for your formidable letter. […]
In a world where responsibility is used as an alibi for information manipulation, irresponsibility sometimes seems attractive to me; yet you attack it with precision. […] There are parts that I do not understand due to my own lack of vocabulary.
Nevertheless, I sense the meaning of your thought, and many considerations seem brilliant to me. You put your finger exactly on a fundamental contradiction of mine and of the culture of these times. Not knowing how to resolve it, I have simply ended up living it.
However, the choices you propose frighten me.
Partly because I do not feel up to making them; partly because instead of opening, they seem to close. I know that in reality they would not close […].
[…] Your beautiful letter gives me courage. Indeed, I find myself wanting to participate less and less in the art circus. In fact: if only it were a circus—it would be fun and much more interesting to cir-culate. You know that I now receive twenty exhibition announcements a day.”

Lucio Pozzi. Correspondence, in Per uscire dalla Valle. Critica di me stesso, edited by Omar Calabrese, La Casa Usher documenti d’arte, Edizione Ponte alle Grazie Editori, Florence, 1992, op. cit., p. 166

“[…] For a long time, Pinto’s relationship with painting was a sort of Jacob’s struggle with the angel, a series of harsh and dramatic clashes where the stakes were high, for it was his very life, the reason for his presence in the world […]; Pinto recognized that it imposed itself upon him as an irrefutable destiny […].
His estrangement from the ordinary connective tissues of artistic life also signified a judgment on ephemeral news and the movement of taste, toward which he feels a certain indifference. […] I do not hesitate to say that there is something decidedly unusual in this painting that isolates itself from the circle of prevailing relationships. […] Sentimental intensity absorbs exteriority and provides the tensive form of this transition, of this encroachment of animated nature into the consensus of visionary fantasy. It is a nature that is not contemplated or used as a pretext, but lived in its deep ‘genetic’ instinct, which comes to a vibrating halt on the canvases and sheets, and therefore appears unusual and unconventional, so spontaneously transitive in its incorporated and evoked power. […]
A thoughtful and sincere personality, who has stripped away appearances and attachments rejected as inessential, who has turned a hard-won richness into a dense and impetuous simplicity, and who is not afraid to present himself naked and disarmed, with the illuminating truth of a sincere vision and an authentic experience of humanity.”

Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Presentation by Carlo L. Ragghianti, testimony by Giuseppe Mazzariol. Querini Stampalia Foundation Venice, August 1972

Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Presentation by Carlo L. Ragghianti, Visual Activities Center, Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara, January 1972

Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, in Cat. Bruno Pinto, La Strozzina, Florence, 1971

“[…] Two cabinets filled with books on painting, philosophy, and the sciences of thought; shelves along the walls with open art books; on the stool near the workspace, an open volume on Caravaggio […].
Before him are many canvases at once, perhaps a dozen; on the floor and around him are still others, in an evident state of becoming, awaiting a renewed contact with the author. In these works, there is no sense of the beginning, construction, and end of the work in the usual sense; everything is clearly in continuous rotation. It is not the usual productive rhythm of research-work-completion; there is no succession in the rhythm of the works, but rather simultaneity. […] Although very different in their formal structure, the expressive vector is to constitute a single, constant, continuous breath. […] The pretext for the pictorial action is any occasion, an ‘accidit’ that is more human than formal, a bodily or spiritual emotion, a state of mystical tension which, while always present as an unconscious emotion, finds, case by case, in the relationship with a certain ‘presence’, with a certain ‘thing’, the occasion to emerge at the level of consciousness and produce a movement of reflection.
Painting is born, according to the truth of its own unequivocal expressive laws, as a means of concentration, abstraction, and metaphysical deepening of this tension.
The research is at a metaphysical level, but not the pictorial support, which functions as a medium to allow penetration into the transcendent sphere. […]
Then the discourse proceeds further and the structure, already endowed with ‘form’, undergoes a reworking; it becomes a point of further deepening, until it becomes almost unrecognizable, with a resulting emotional state that is completely different, and so on through other subsequent states. […]
It is at this state of maximum spiritual intensity that the maximum of pictorial logic coincides. Suddenly everything becomes simple, clear, genuine, and perfect, but also natural and clean; a thing blossoms as if by magic, and nothing more seems to transpire of the past tribulations. […]
The painting is but the trace remaining from a metaphysical intuition, a tangible sign between the sensible and the supersensible, something concluded that has nothing more to await. […]
In it, all tensions toward ‘the future’—which in our world represent the profound cause of anguish and anxiety—seem suddenly to subside; a future that now seems to have become the only space in which to transpose all our expectations, to the detriment of a now dormant capacity for relationship with the present moment […].
In a moment such as the current one, this pictorial practice offers us a viaticum that is almost forgotten because it is too close at hand: our reclaiming of consciousness with the present, hic et nunc, as the only condition for being able to reach a ‘creative’ situation which is, above all, still and always, a capacity for complete relationship, spiritual and bodily, with reality.”

Glauco Gresleri, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Presentation by Carlo L. Ragghianti, with writings by Luciano Padovese, Glauco Gresleri. Galleria d’Arte Sagittaria, Pordenone, 1972 cit., p. 9

“For Pinto, time and space are not ‘fictions’ but the true structures of the articulation of experience: in this precise sense, his painting is anachronistic.
In it, no mannerisms are manifested, but always declarations of content that emerge, which through painting must reach a definition, a primitive and plausible boundary line […]. The space and time of Pinto’s painting are the space and time of the foundation, of its manifestation, of its expression in perceptive structures, in a visual language: a narrative of a single, decisive, founding event that memory cannot (or will not) eliminate because it has taken root within it with violence, with absoluteness. […] Yet to think of Pinto’s works in this dimension seems to the writer to presuppose having crossed a boundary line that is instead constantly uncertain (and in certain cases is the condition of poetry itself): that which distinguishes—but for this very reason also keeps in relation—the logical and pre-logical link between strong cognitive functions and metaphorical knowledge. […]
‘Truth’ for Pinto is given and is measurable; it resides neither in taste, nor in current trends, nor even less in intuition.
It cannot be guarded by a state of hallucination, but rather is evaluable in relation to the mental field that makes ideas, execution processes, and research operational.
Art is, then, the construction of purpose… it is hope. […]”

Bruno Bandini, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Opere dal 1953 al 1987, edited by Claudio Cerritelli, foreword by Filippo Sassoli dè Bianchi, with writings by Enrico Cesare Gori, Concetto Pozzati, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Bandini, Vezio Ruggeri, Giuseppe Dossetti, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987 cit., p.49

“[…] The restlessness and uncertainty of living in the world only as an anticipation of salvation, while the impotence of man to attempt to be righteous before God is always and inevitably fulfilled, leads Pinto to weave a web where signs lose their balance and become unrecognizable, fraying and losing the path of linear narrative, wandering off to become mere presences within the space of the painting’s design. The narrative of man is confused and reduced to the babbling of a child seeking the light, and now he is left only with the time to await it from elsewhere, from beyond the painting. […]
But Pinto’s work is never paranoid, theatrical, or ambiguous, as the Baroque would become after Proto-Mannerism. […]
One must paint ‘as if’ painting were already light, and to test the impotence of matter to be light while remaining matter.”

Carmine Benincasa, in Cat. Pinto… and Luther, project and concept by Carmine Benincasa and Lorenzo Sassoli, contributions by Marisa Vescovo and Luciano Nanni. Leader Arte, Rome 1983

“[…] Everyone has a shattered world behind them, and must always rebuild a grammar, a language, from scratch. […]
When Pinto traces an image on the canvas, the latter defines itself as the concretization of a general anxiety of a cognitive nature.[…] The artist does not seek to misrepresent the ‘malady of the century,’ into which his analysis delves as if into the viscera of a diseased body; rather, he wishes to be heard not as a ‘sermon’ but as a stance that does not dissolve personal identity into the magma of momentary desires, that does not postulate the elimination of values nor of needs, and does not forget the necessities of the body, which must be investigated and studied. […]
He does not seek a ‘superman’ but a man with the misery, passion, tenderness, arrogance, generosity, meanness, originality, and the banalities or imbecility of every man.
No one can set themselves up as a judge of those who do evil, because no one is certain of not doing it, and one must certainly never rid oneself of this awareness. The signs, the color, and the material demonstrate the need to review certain things, to bring them out, to touch them, to feel them with every possible sense, ‘to say them,’ to recount them, to link them to a ‘whole’: to the present, to the past, perhaps even to the problem of death? […].
Pinto casts his gaze upon all the appearances of life, giving voice to the absurdity of existence as well as to the meaning that sometimes seems to illuminate it. The artist does not say whether he wants the world to be order or chaos, or whether pain is a necessity or an unredeemed tragedy. His religious familiarity with life grants Pinto an uninhibited, total confidence with the entire range of sexuality and the ability to represent it with a freedom that the bourgeois intellectual cannot possess, because for him every story, life, and desires continuously resume their surprising game.”

Marisa Vescovo, in Cat. Pinto… and Luther, project and concept by Carmine Benincasa and Lorenzo Sassoli, contribution by Marisa Vescovo and Luciano Nanni. Leader Arte, Rome 1983

“It seems to be destiny that when discussing Pinto, one ends up speaking more about his life than his work, almost as if he had conceived of life as art; but so it is: his life bears the hallmarks not of eccentricity, which always risks kitsch, but rather of exceptionality, which leans toward the simple and the incredible, like the actions of Buster Keaton in numerous scenes from his films.
Indeed, one could also say of Bruno’s painting that it is exceptional and tends toward extraordinarily simple forms […] a reality rediscovered and relived in concrete terms of general experience. The relationship with current culture and with every preceding figurative trend is constantly mediated by the necessities of life, re-proposed every day as a creative act and involving fundamental choices every day […]. No project in these works is a binding a priori, […].
Pinto is a painter of necessity, following an internal dictate that admits no delays, trickery, or strange shortcuts for the most convenient appointment with the taste of the moment; he is a frontier painter, solitary, committed, and absolutely convinced that the work must still be—and more than ever today—the bearer of a simple and direct human message. […]”

Giuseppe Mazzariol, in Cat. Bruno Pinto, Fondazione Querini Stampalia Venice, August 1972

“[…] The intention to communicate is immense in Pinto’s work.
It is, I would say, the desire to ‘reincorporate’ a universe into painting, nothing less.
Therefore, it is not the ‘pictorial’ aspect of a world and a man, but the world and the man as they are and as they ought to be.” The elements of his work, therefore, are entirely ‘non-homogeneous’ both in relation to the painting of our time, of yesterday and today (perhaps of tomorrow), and among themselves.
It is as if a stone had to appear with its own dimensions on the canvas rather than being reduced to the two-dimensionality of painting, and, along with it, its religious experience (an experience that has not yet come to rest in an equilibrium of faith and life): it is as if this, too, had to become a ‘figure’.” […]
It is not quite clear, at least to me, how much of Pinto’s ‘project’ of painting is purely provocative. And it is possible that it contains spurious elements, cultural shortcomings, intentional and especially unintentional cleverness, examples of a difficult temperament, and a deliberate moral intransigence. All of this is not yet ‘painting’, but that is not to say it cannot become so when it is the subject of a true ‘experience’ such as that of Bruno Pinto.
His works, in fact, despite their varying formats and techniques, acquire a unified physiognomy and character upon reflection, because there is present in them (in all of them), far more than in each individual one, the same principle and the same end. This is, for now, their greatest significance and their necessity.”

Michele Ranchetti, A good “difficult temperament”, in Figura di demone – writings for Bruno Pinto by Giancarlo Gaeta, Claudio Cerritelli, Omar Calabrese, Sergio Vuskovic Rojo, Patrizia Vicinelli, Michele Ranchetti, Lucio Pozzi, Parol Quaderni d’Arte 3, Bologna March 1987

“[…] The void in the paintings, or the mental silence that accompanies an existential situation, are the signs that one is on the right path: you are entering the complexity of experience, and you begin to wake up, to rub your itching hands; your heart rate alters until you glimpse the footprint and begin to scent it like a hound, following it with the entire history of painting while trying to find the hidden secret of its nature, and you begin to have the vision that things have a sense, a precise meaning; then, and only then, your hands grasp the brushes again and the painting begins to create itself, the colors and lines begin to speak to each other and to you, that previous void finds its precise content and you begin to paint with your whole nature, with the entire body of the painting, until the new tectonic layout arises—not confused, but rather well-defined—which leads you toward the other; a place where geometry generates its own light, and the light dazzles its forms; thus you find the way to encounter the reality that changes, but which is also changed by your ‘doing,’ just as you change yourself. […]
The terrible moment of fear arrives: you feel the panic terror, you feel it when you paint, in the heart of the Ego.
It is an experience of the Ego that is neither desired nor sought.
It simply presents itself as a pressure mortifying the thought.
It is an experience that cannot be controlled voluntarily.
Fear that generates a sensation of blockage, which can lead to paralysis, almost an experience of death.
And, although it can be suppressed, you have the confused consciousness that you must remain within it, because you refuse to escape into memory.
And then the fright turns into silence.
[…] Neither illumination nor naturalistic fruition, but rather living light that frightens people, that creates in them a sensation of dread; it strikes not only the gaze but the entire body. And this takes shape in qualitative perceptions that, at the limit of your labor, represent the ultimate threshold of vital experience, and this is commonly called a state of grace.
Instead, as long as the observer remains bound to their habitual way of looking, they know it only as mere aesthetic enjoyment. This modality is, however, destined to be overcome both in its value as subjective fruition and in its value as an established objective physical datum. A moment that initially strikes as an unconscious message arriving from the outside, and which, through naivety or the effect of primary reception, one does not realize they are encoding: it is the state of color as one ‘instinctively’ sees it, in the sense that one sees it as one is accustomed to looking at it.
But the light of your paintings cannot truly manifest itself in the subject until the subject goes beyond encoding—that is, until the subject receives messages different from those that the naive person believes are coming from the outside. […]”

Sergio Vuskovic Rojo, the other side of painting, Parol Quaderni d’Arte 3, Bologna March 1987

“[…] Let us then observe the nature of this ‘Stump’, not so much its iconographic evidence apparently linked to the naturalistic knot of representation. Let us focus instead on the space, the way in which this form takes possession of it.
The form is suspended in a dizzying immobility; the figure is rooted in the space of representation, attracted by a simultaneity of forces, in a relationship that is violent but not one of collision with the rest—a core of tension rooted in a way that is not entirely clear. It contains vision in every single detail.
Within the physiognomy of this ‘stump’ lie all the dynamics of Pinto’s subsequent works, synthesized in the ‘figure-ground’ relationship that the artist would go on to explore, at times even violently. It is the anxious search for an operational rhythm that has the virtue of articulating this relationship, emancipating it from the archaic, original force contained within this image. […]
Here: the work communicates an intense vertigo, a non-metaphorical expression of the process of knowledge that Pinto demands from art.
This core of the image could function as a process of plunging the gaze that seeks ‘vision’. A dynamic space where the represented figures prompt conflicting directions, perspectival reversals, immobility, and flight communicated in the same instant of perception.
A dizzying way of actualizing Vision as a place of ontological conflict, an instrument of orientation that begins to move, assuming the same necessities throughout the image—always suspended and contradicted, reaffirmed around multiple points of shifting, whirlpools around which space emerges and disappears. […] Everything is always called into question, reanimated, there, in the studio where Pinto, besieged by paintings, is continually caught in the mental spiral that leads him to consider himself the artist of a unifying and indivisible operation. […]”

Claudio Cerritelli, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Works from 1953 to 1987, edited by Claudio Cerritelli, foreword by Filippo Sassoli dè Bianchi, with writings by Enrico Cesare Gori, Concetto Pozzati, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Bandini, Vezio Ruggeri, Giuseppe Dossetti, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987

“[…] I believe you have burned yourself at an incredibly intense flame.
Your Ceppo struck me like few things in my life.
It has a sharp gaze for the slightest vibration, and in every atom of matter, it captures the implosions of stars and suns […].
Your painting had placed itself on the tracks of the most destructive coincidence of art and life.
That Ceppo admits no further development—perhaps it wanted you to use it to set yourself on fire. Fortunately, you did not. You resisted that voice—it must have cost you immensely (I think I understand: marriage, home, etc.); it was your most difficult work. And even more so, managing to work again. I am happy that you are succeeding. […]
You will never be a mediocre painter who settles into a style. […]
Therefore, I ‘receive’ your work with affection. You do not know how much it also speaks of mine.
I do not believe your works are ‘judgable’ from an aesthetic or formal profile, etc. […] Dissonances everywhere. The work, from here, cannot succeed. […] Almost denying the possibility of the work. This seems to be somewhat your ‘destiny’.
Can you face it, can you transform it?
I do not know. I can only remain a witness to what you will do […].
From this letter, I hope you understand my interest in your work along with my inability to speak of it in a critical context.
It is a letter that I am also writing, in a way, to myself. […]
I am certain you will understand.”

Correspondence, in Per uscire dalla Valle. Critica di me stesso, edited by Omar Calabrese, La Casa Usher documenti d’arte, Edizione Ponte alle Grazie Editori, Florence, 1992

“The decisive abandonment of his native Rome and the equally decisive choice of his rule of life date back to the 1960s (following the ways of an ethical rejection of our mechanistic society, so functional and so well-sweetened, which only much later our culture peacefully adopted in its best youth) with the free and wandering step of one who literally wants to build himself from scratch and without any hesitation. […]
Art, for Pinto, is then a profound gesture because it is absolute: it does not, in fact, admit questions of convenience, and even less of coexistence with other gestures that claim equal vigor and finality. If this happens, his art materially erases itself to renew itself as a simple questioning and inquiring consciousness, implacably, until the crudest, unspeakable self-exposure. […]
After the dark years in Arezzo, painting reveals itself to him not as a reason for living, but as life itself; not as an instrument of knowledge, interchangeable with others, but as consciousness itself in its most concrete, or if you will, earthy breath. […] Pinto never tires of telling us: to change one’s eye is not just to change one’s eye, but our entire being in every vital fiber of thought and spirit.”

Luciano Nanni, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Opere dal 1953 al 1987, edited by Claudio Cerritelli, foreword by Filippo Sassoli dè Bianchi, with writings by Enrico Cesare Gori, Concetto Pozzati, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Bandini, Vezio Ruggeri, Giuseppe Dossetti, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987 cit., p. 46

“[…] I sensed the solitary character of your art and its freedom from any compromise.
Of your early years in Monteveglio, I remember above all perceiving your intimate ardor, tormented and tormenting, perhaps confused but always without artifice or ostentation; it made me think of a phrase from Isaiah, in the Latin of the Vulgata: ‘Spiritus vester, ut ignis vorabit vos’.
I was very saddened because, although I assisted with much participation and great affection, I felt powerless: I did not know where to begin, not to extinguish this fire (it was certainly not my intention to do so) but to grasp its meaning and provide some small indication that might serve to utilize this accumulation of energy and this blaze. It is certain, however, that it had an effect on me: when I approached this blaze, it seemed to me that it could contribute to burning away much of the straw that was in me and in the things I was trying to put together.
I repeat that I have always drawn great benefit from our dialogues, and the more they seemed to lead nowhere, the more they forced me to rethink many of my acts and attitudes and, above all, induced me to review the purity of my faith and its religious expressions.
This, if you allow me, I would like to say to you, at least as a hypothesis: at a certain point, in order to truly be art and to be able to ‘keep alive and present in our earthly consciousness the ultimate sense, the fulfillment of a full image of man’ (however one understands it), does art itself not need to anchor itself to some ontological subsistence?
I know it. You are very afraid, and rightly so because you see so many cases of it, of the possibilities of self-deception and mystification, of the simplistic or conventional impulses of psychological desire. But in my opinion, it cannot all be just psychology.
There must be a way to step outside the ‘psychological’ and go deep into the matters of our spirit.
You yourself admit it when, a few weeks ago, you wrote to me ‘of the possibility of a real inspired movement in the heart made simple in real and conscious pain’. And so I looked at the last pages you sent me, in which you speak of an infinity contained and expressed in the everyday, recognized and accepted as such, not lived with an alienated consciousness.
Real pain accepted with conscious submission, and the hard patience consciously willed and applied to the uniformity of the everyday, break, in my opinion, the magic circle of psychology, in which all illusions and all confusions are so often possible, and produce—as authentic prayer can produce
(perhaps because they themselves are prayers)—that clarity of heart and mind in which, I believe, art too can find itself and its own purest forms. – Monte Sole 08/25/1987-”

Giuseppe Dossetti, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Opere dal 1953 al 1987, edited by Claudio Cerritelli, foreword by Filippo Sassoli dè Bianchi, with writings by Enrico Cesare Gori, Concetto Pozzati, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Bandini, Vezio Ruggeri, Giuseppe Dossetti, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987 cit., p. 54

Correspondence in Per uscire dalla Valle. Critica di me stesso, edited by Omar Calabrese, La Casa Usher, Edizione Ponte alle Grazie Editori, Florence, 1992

“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 arises from contact with his works?
Pinto’s work solicits and is solicited, first and foremost, by ‘protomental’ processes! […] With the term protomental, Bion refers to a series of processes in which intellectual functions and bodily activities are intermingled. These are the primary mental organizations that originate directly from information coming from one’s own body. […] For example, the processes of ‘retaining and expelling’ which are originally physiological processes as they refer to real exchanges between the organism and the environment. […] In this border zone between the physical and the mental, 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 Bruno’s case, we realize that this theme, along with other protomental ones, becomes fundamental; this means that such a practice also presents itself as a poetics of ‘Knowledge’. […]
Pinto’s work imposes both a spatial and a temporal reading of the represented events. In other words, one cannot fully grasp one of these works if the viewer—almost entering the painting—does not, on the one hand, sequentially traverse the represented chromatic spaces in temporal succession, moving from one area to the next (temporal reading), and on the other hand, implement a global perception in which all spatial events are somehow simultaneous (spatial reading). […] In fact, in Pinto’s work, the theme of the figure-ground relationship acquires a particular significance. Separating an object from its context means not only recognizing it intellectually but bringing it to life, giving it existence.
[…] We could say that the significant core of the poetics lies in the representation of spatial events that establish dialectically shifting relationships between them.
In fact, the viewer is prompted toward various readings of protomental events (different relationships between containers and contents: different relations between figures and backgrounds, etc.) […].
In this way, the restless and unstable dynamics of spatial relations, after a complex and articulated perceptive journey, recompose into a higher level of organization, another exponential meaning.
In conclusion, Pinto’s work automatically produces protomental processes but also critically redefines them in a new dimension of knowledge.
The discourse is, however, circular: knowledge constitutes 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, foreword by Filippo Sassoli dè Bianchi, with writings by Enrico Cesare Gori, Concetto Pozzati, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Bandini, Vezio Ruggeri, Giuseppe Dossetti, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987 cit., p. 50

“It was in the second half of the 1960s that, after a long and elaborate maturation, Bruno Pinto’s artistic journey reached the point of clarifying its crucial problematic nodes.
Before then, it had been a lucid, voracious, and anxious journey into the very reasons of the modern and the chapters of its foundation. It was not a modal path, however, nor one of adopting stylistic chapters, but rather a rigorous exploration of themes and issues of radical significance. […] A continuous questioning of value, intellectual consistency, and the notion of reality and fiction; of the self-certification of meaning in the image and complex referentiality, flowing into the symbolic; of the genetic force and vital energy of formativity, and the tense, distant scrutiny of cultural motivations.
In a word, it is an ‘il faut être moderne’ but in the absence of the ideological snares of avant-gardism, through a complex and sharp untimeliness, capable of engaging with cognitive frontiers—and by cognitive, I mean those of knowledge, not the infamous worldly cunning of the system—and simultaneously with the great occurrences of the past, from the Quattrocento to Courbet, in the name of a selected and repeatedly reconsidered genealogy and vocation. […] It is this concreteness—not prefigured but as if enclosed within the resoluteness of the process, besieged by a feverish strategy not enamored with itself, by an urgency that is not rhetorical declamation but the gasping, breathing pressure of form to become its own spaciousness—that constitutes the open paradigm to which Pinto adheres, in private-scale sheets and studio reasoning, as well as in those that aspire to stand as completed works on par with his no less proud and kindred pictorial achievements. […]
With today’s paintings, sheets, and sculptures, it is as if Pinto were arriving at a harbor of complete certainties regarding the necessity and the raison d’être of his work: and, therefore, began to feel flowing through his nerves, the veins of his arms, and the excitement of his mind, the figures of a ‘new’ that art still contains, possible, without betraying its own identity, but ultimately not generated by the stale mechanics of modal meanings or petitions of principle.
Like a body, in short, which, certain of its own genetic code and its non-negotiable will to exist, can take on a proud, authoritative, and precise appearance: a substantial ‘new’ that Pinto is beginning to glimpse, and which perhaps his work will be able to bring into being.”

Flaminio Gualdoni, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Luoghi Controversi del cuore, edited by Silvia Evangelisti, with writings by Bruno Bandini, Andrea Emiliani, Silvia Evangelisti, Flaminio Gualdoni, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, Bologna, April 1990, cit., p. 13

Flaminio Gualdoni, 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. 11

“[…] I have sought your work with the utmost commitment (and much affection—as it must be: we cannot truly seek except that which, in some way and for some reason, we already love). I will not tell you what you already know yourself. Your work is certainly important—it has the hardness of things that grow without help and without compromise, within themselves. Your work is authentic, you know it. […] I believe you have burned yourself at an incredibly intense flame. Your Ceppo struck me like few other paintings in my life. […] It is a little Van Gogh. These are flames that can only continue to burn by burning you—only if you become their fuel. […] That Ceppo admits no further development; perhaps it wanted you to use it to set yourself on fire. Fortunately, you did not. You resisted that voice—it must have cost you immensely (I think I understand: marriage, home, etc.); it was your most difficult task. And even more so, to manage to work again. I am happy that you are succeeding.
[…] You will never be a mediocre painter who settles into a style. You must want your painting, your survived painting, to remember the danger from which it escaped. Now, your work is a painful memory of it and an attempt to express the dimension of survival. It is the dimension of us all. Therefore, I search for your work with affection. […] To pursue unity, coordinates, meanings within it would seem almost blasphemous to me. There are flashes, lacerations, informal backgrounds, almost pop-like material emergences—but necessarily confused. As if to deny the possibility of the work itself. This seems to be somewhat your destiny. This letter is not a critique; it is just a letter. It is a letter that I am also writing, in a way, to myself. I cannot speak to others about these things. The value your work holds for me is in a place that has nothing, or very little, to do with the values by which one must judge or analyze something when one wishes to communicate it. I am certain you will understand. Affectionate regards.”

Massimo Cacciari, in Epistolario, in Per uscire dalla Valle. Critica di me stesso, edited by Omar Calabrese, La Casa Usher, Ponte alle Grazie Editori, Florence 1992, p. 182

“[…] And that the artist should find such resonance within the intellectual world appears natural to anyone who knows him with even a modicum of depth. […] Artists like Pinto are exceptions […]. Certainly, the critical literature regarding him is second to none. And all this is said to testify that the complexity of the artist’s search for (and of) Truth has never fallen on deaf ears. Instead, it has always found extremely interested and astute interlocutors. His works are a happy encounter between art and criticism, between the foundations of aesthetics and a personal quest to give meaning to the knowledge of life, without falling for the easy delusions of fashionable certainties or ideologies used as alibis for one’s own insecurities.”

Valerio Dehò, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Dopo il Silenzio, edited by Peter Weiermaier, with contributions by Massimo Cacciari, Peter Weiermaier, Valerio Dehò, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna 2003.

“Perhaps psychoanalytic inquiry offers a plausible representation of human development when it reveals the perceptual ‘hole’; that obscure sensation that seizes us if we observe ourselves within without preconceptions. […] I would like to begin with ‘La Valle’ (The Valley), which stands at the midpoint of Bruno’s creative journey.
La Valle is the remote farmstead in the mountains where Bruno arrives during his phase of rejecting cultural stereotypes. […] This obscure sensation is elaborated into the myth of the Poet capable of enduring his own anguish and fear, in order to create images for others. This is what B. Pinto sets out to do.
He says that in the ‘Valley’ he sought, quite simply, to ‘see what cannot be seen’. […] To grow and create, everyone must face the contrasts between the real and the psychic, love and hate, the human and the sublime. Everyone must alternately not see and see reality in order to survive. In Bruno’s work, on one hand, the labor of growth is aimed at eliminating cultural stereotypes through the recovery of original mental capacity.
With the tools of criticism, he scrutinizes reality. […] Through intense and painful work, he organizes a world ordered on two levels, ‘the sensible and the supersensible’: a world traversed and unified by vocation and the problem.
The ‘Problem’ is: how to ‘succeed in embodying the things intuited?’. […]
For psychoanalysis, experience becomes intuition when the psychic structure can use reflection in a transitive sense; there is a great difference between the mirror that reflects the image and the Ego that reflects on the contents.
To avoid this distinction, man is offered the mystical temptation, which transforms the sensory world into ecstatic contemplation, often bordering on the aesthetic and equally ruthless.
Bruno does not elude this passage; on the contrary, he throws himself into the cosmogonic orgasm.
However, like every sincere impostor, he instills doubt in us: is it truly so?
Even more frightening is the ‘Vocation’ to painting: who calls him, who calls us?
[…] In the background remains the hallucinated tension seeking representation: the painting does not exist except as a method of knowledge. Just as hallucination precedes real thought. He says this while confounding the conscious and unconscious planes of his existence, driven by creative anxiety.
[…] The unsettling representation of the ‘Ceppo’ (the un-familiar) bursts forth. The natural, non-trivial object, gathered on the riverbed at Monteveglio, is truly a mythopoetic fragment. It repeats the gesture of the first man: of the one who transferred into natural sculpture the reflection of his own face refracted by the mirror of water—a refracted and broken face, a vague and hallucinating face. […]
If we approach the canvas, we see zones contained within the Ceppo, and above all, the play of the background offering what Bruno would call the mastery of real dissociation through formal dissociation. […] The sensory sensuality of the pictorial act appeared to me in its vividness beneath the pictorial rationality. Everything Bruno felt was a virtual presentation: the freezing of muscles, the stopping of breath, the obscure drive that bypasses fear ‘until the body is perceived in a paradisiacal way’. We find traces of these sensations in the representations of the painting. In this, we rediscover primary sensory perception, the imitative confusion of the thing that promotes the preparatory identification of detachment, as described by metapsychology. In the clinical setting, we see the transition from imitation to identification during the growth process; here we see him preparing (Bruno speaks of omens) for detachment, first from primary confusion (object, body, canvas), then from the finished painting. Everything could have a real meaning, Pinto says, only if the tumultuous process created the object, and in this I agree with him.
On the contrary, the knowledge of the real Unconscious pushes us, it seems to me, to set aside the attempt to ‘condition’ basic rhythms with ideas; these follow their natural course with successive peaks and emptyings.
The administration of the ‘obscure form’ occurs through a natural labor aimed not at conditioning but at governing and re-governing the Unconscious.
Certainly, all of this—the sensory organs and their relative silences or emptyings—is terrifying. Because they depersonalize.
But the premonition comes from us, not from Elsewhere, or rather, we are the Elsewhere; the Elsewhere is our mind confused with nature. […] His mental adventure is precise: it is not distinguishable in a single painting but unites all the others in an enormous fresco. […] When we realize that the interior is psychic and virtual, we leave the hallucinating situation of presentations and rediscover the real object. Thus is represented the eternal opposition between the real and the psychic.
In this, Pinto participates in the great human adventure, in his ‘median’ world which he, rightly, defends tooth and nail.”

Enrico Cesare Gori, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Opere dal 1953 al 1987, edited by Claudio Cerritelli, foreword by Filippo Sassoli dè Bianchi, with contributions by Enrico Cesare Gori, Concetto Pozzati, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Bandini, Vezio Ruggeri, Giuseppe Dossetti, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987 cit., p.34

Correspondence in Per uscire dalla Valle. Critica di me stesso, edited by Omar Calabrese, La Casa Usher, Edizione Ponte alle Grazie Editori, Florence, 1992

“[…] Pinto’s painting is great because it affirms the ontological nothingness of things as such, which are useful only for the survival of our self. The vanity of all things is the founding measure of his art. […]
In his works, Pinto effects a transformation; he tears things away from that historical perspective and makes them exist in themselves as truth.
Pain in its naked reality is the transcription of the absence of meaning. And existence liberated in the sense that it escapes projectuality, is art.
It is not the subject represented or the meaning that makes a work of art, but its lack of meaning. […]”

Massimo Donà, contribution to the exhibition Bruno Pinto. Dopo il Silenzio, curated by Peter Weiermaier, with contributions by Massimo Cacciari and Valerio Dehò, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna 2003.

“[…] He has been invoked here by Giacomini, Cacciari, Ragghianti, Dossetti, Guttuso, Zolla, Argan, Calabrese, Severini, and all the others who have said astounding things about Bruno.
Cacciari’s page is one of the most intense, profound, and compromising things a philosopher can say to an artist.
Why then does Pinto take refuge in the secluded place evoked here, possessing all this talent?
Why hide and seek a new, entirely inner wealth? Why a wife, four children, and the reconciliation of this reality—which by its nature aims to endure—with the maximum of poverty, precariousness, lack of foresight, and abandonment to a destiny of such grave studies of values, such deep silent dialogues with the other part of us, that is, our soul?
Why is he imprisoned in a form of inflexibility, in a very costly consistency that keeps him away from the tools of self-promotion, from the market, from the willingness to tell his story beyond painting, almost demanding that everything about him must be discovered through painting, as if his life passed through it and it were the only trace the painter wishes to leave of himself—he who is also an intellectual, in his own way a theologian, and certainly a philosopher.”

Sergio Zavoli, speech at the exhibition Bruno Pinto. Dopo il Silenzio, curated by Peter Weiermaier, with contributions by Massimo Cacciari and Valerio Dehò, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna 2003.

“This work compels a very untimely vision of painting.
It is painting, painting and nothing else. We are faced with a problem: it is an untimely painting, but why?
Not only because it is different from everything else one sees: most painting is born from ideas. Bruno Pinto is a man full of ideas, but I do not believe his work is born from ideas.
I believe that if you read these works without prejudice, you are struck by a certain sense of modesty in the classical sense of the term, because here it is not ideas that are staged, but bones, blood, and nerves; what is staged is a being at loggerheads with life.
You do not contemplate a life that tries to speak despite everything, in spite of everything; you feel compassion for it, but you cannot contemplate it as if you were before something complete in itself. This is totally untimely. […] Contemporary art demands a distance that plays on the removal of anguish.
We are before a work in which Pinto, whether intentionally or not, asks us to be a living participation together.
Argan understood it perfectly: this painting comes to blows with fashion, that devouring fashion, that omnivorous market. Pinto denies himself any heavenly hope, yet he obstinately refuses to go to hell.”

Massimo Cacciari, speech at the exhibition Bruno Pinto. Dopo il Silenzio, curated by Peter Weiermaier, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna 2003.

“[…] We are very good at recognizing talent only once it is gone.
These are the great games of our culture; while people are alive, envy and rather sinister feelings prevail, yet we manage to hold celebrations for decades and centenaries. […]
Therefore, I am pleased that his works are being shown; they have truly captivated and moved me […]. If we were to use a little more humility and a little less arrogance when looking at you, we would succeed in discovering a few more truths.”

Paolo Crepet, speech at the exhibition Bruno Pinto. Dopo il Silenzio, curated by Peter Weiermaier, with contributions by Massimo Cacciari and Valerio Dehò, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna 2003.

“Bruno is ‘pinto’, painted by his own painting: not metaphorically but literally, because his painting physically imprints itself upon his flesh; it marks him, brands him, and thus takes possession of him. Bruno has always been held captive by his painting, and the price of his ransom has yet to be defined. Bruno Pinto’s solitude, his real history, and his artistic history have cast him from the very beginning where he still remains: in a place that rejects all equivalence, the rule that dominates social and market relations. In this place, rather than appearing as its product, he creates a rift that even unexpected future valuations could never heal.”

Stefano Bonaga, Bruno Pinto. La ricerca del riscatto, Edizioni Orchidea Fissa Arte, Bologna 2003

“[…] An author beloved by critics and ignored by the market—not because the market was not ready to digest these works, but because he did not accept that Faustian bargain of selling his soul in exchange for something like notoriety, popularity, or proliferation, […]. Pinto wanted to be neither rich, nor famous, nor powerful.
His work conveys a sense of essential moral commitment; a work of art cannot be born without a profound reason, without expression deriving from being ‘in-pression’—from being within this expressive tension, from being a necessity, a necessity that is the artist’s very raison d’être.
Once the work was completed, he was intelligent enough to have found what his expressions then brought into the world; his task was done.
The part Pinto refused to play is the part that does not concern him.
He had to express ‘in-pression’; the rest (be it any great gallery owner…) is a matter that does not concern him; he does not want to waste time dealing with it; it is not his business; he is already posthumous to himself.”

Vittorio Sgarbi, speech at the exhibition Bruno Pinto. Dopo il Silenzio, curated by Peter Weiermaier, with contributions by Massimo Cacciari and Valerio Dehò, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna 2003.

“[…] Pain, eros, and money are three elements that are part of human history and which economic science has sought to erase by creating well-being. […] Economics has not resolved the experience of pain because when we move from money to ‘goods’ to well-being, the so-called ‘paradox of happiness’ is triggered; that is, the ‘good’ used to extract utility produces only pain, because true happiness lies in the full realization of desire, but this is indefinitely different from the economy of money as a commodity.”

Luigino Bruni, contribution to the exhibition Bruno Pinto. Dopo il Silenzio, curated by Peter Weiermaier, with contributions by Massimo Cacciari and Valerio Dehò, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna 2003.

“I did not know Maestro Pinto, but he said something beautiful when describing his own experience; therefore, I must respect the experience of another even if I cannot quite fully understand the paintings.
Pinto said that when he had the experience at ‘La Valle’, it was like the experience of a swimmer who stops struggling and at a certain moment discovers that he is floating; this experience of inverted desire is the experience of floating. In the absolute, one floats; with objects, one struggles. One can also seek harmony, but one must always pay attention to the fact that within the word harmony (armonia) resonates the word Arm (Arma) […]. Where there is harmony, there is combat, concert, a struggle takes place […].
One must know how to float above, below, or within the combat; to let be. Omnipotence is not succeeding in overcoming an obstacle, because it will never be overcome; omnipotence is letting be, it is perceiving the absolute by perceiving the limit: it is letting be.
This experience of surrender, of floating, is called the mind of Christ in the Christian faith; it is the folly of the Crucified. It does not consist of rejection but of surrender, of letting be; this is His omnipotence.
But one must have the mind of Christ to be able to think, act, and express oneself in this way.”

Father Giuseppe Barzaghi, speech at the exhibition Bruno Pinto. Dopo il Silenzio, curated by Peter Weiermaier, with contributions by Massimo Cacciari and Valerio Dehò, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna 2003.

“[…] Your works have withstood, by virtue of their density, the possibility of being reused by the eye more than once: of being seen and seen again.
This is the primary characteristic of a work of art that can endure and, as such, can hold value—not only in an economic sense, but as a reference for our psyche. […] Western culture has always attributed economic value to the work of art for various reasons, some purely competitive in nature, in order to possess it; but in reality, it has always done so because it attributed a participatory sacrifice to an economic sacrifice. […]”

P. Daverio, contribution to the exhibition Bruno Pinto. Dopo il Silenzio, curated by Peter Weiermaier, with contributions by Massimo Cacciari and Valerio Dehò, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna 2003.

“[…] Thomas Mann writes that illness makes one brilliant, and in Doctor Faustus he elaborates somewhat on this relationship between creativity and illness.
He says that genius is a form of vital energy deeply experienced in illness.
A form that draws from illness to become creative; the illness that bestows a brilliance which leaps over obstacles in reckless intoxication, bounding from rock to rock, and is a thousand times more benevolent to life than the health that drags itself along, shuffling in slippers. […]
Pinto has sublimely expressed the dead-end despair that cannot be traced back to any concrete cause, the paralyzing fear, the panic over the deception of life, the ruinous descent into this terrible condition of gray misery, whose very characteristic is to render us incapable of any mental activity. Only the passionate desire to express himself can drive him into a struggle in which he sometimes emerges victorious, but not always. Such sad misery is not only the enemy but also the prerequisite and the object of his activity; that which possesses a paralyzing power then produces a creative activity of the highest value, conferring upon the art that elevated tone which must be recognized in the various works. […]
What man has achieved that is greatest, he owes to the painful feeling of the incompleteness of destiny; nothing makes us as great as a great sorrow.”

Vittorio Volterra, contribution to the exhibition Bruno Pinto. Dopo il Silenzio, curated by Peter Weiermaier, with contributions by Massimo Cacciari and Valerio Dehò, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna 2003.

“You say that painting a picture is an erotic drive: can it be
similar to a sexual act?

The procedures implemented to create an authentically modern pictorial work are very, very complex and, in any case, can never be translated into a project; at the beginning, they engage all the powers of existence in a confused way: but every human act is by nature, always, an act that evokes Eros and is, always, totalizing, yet habitual consciousness has no awareness of it; it is stunned, hypnotized by it.
In a properly genital relationship, bodily sexuality is involved to the extreme limit of its strength in a spasm aimed at overcoming physical excitement to reach the fulcrum in an embrace in which both subjects simultaneously experience themselves as entirely united as they are distinct. The entire life of an existence within the embrace is destined (consciously or not) to experience an ecstatic event, or rather to assume a simultaneity of realities that appear to the habitual consciousness as conflicting, foreign, different, other than one’s own self, and which it suffers confusedly.
Eros is the great mystery of the World; birth and death are always present in Eros. Always evoked by Eros to be transcended: in every authentically pictorial act, one seeks, in the dark, the path for the fulfillment of an embrace of one’s entire existence—thoughts, intuitions, feelings, bodily reality, psyche, intellect…—which violently desires to take into itself the life of the Other: sexuality calls Eros to express itself with all the force of its pathos. The sexual drive is always the expression in our individual life of that unimaginable event we call falling in love; in this, the presence of another life manifests itself in our existence, which arouses, and is aroused by, the desire to assume the other; this obscure perception of the other than oneself is frightening and for this reason attracts. Our Ego obsessively desires to experience omnipotence.

What do you mean by sexuality?

The sexual drive is, so to speak, the signal that violently alerts us to the presence of the other.
It is necessary to distinguish the physiological-naturalistic sexual call or drive from the violent and conflicting forces of Eros, which I nevertheless always try to make coexist, to contain, and to conjugate in my works.
The images of the world that you define as metropolitan communicate nothing of the power of Eros; they are an artificial, abstract, degraded, and degrading expression of the enigmatic forces and values present in life within natural bodily sexuality:
metropolitan images aim to arouse artificial, suggestive sexual calls; they never express anything, absolutely nothing, of the immeasurable dramatic forces present in erotic power.
Metropolitan images are the expression of a genital sexuality already castrated, debased, and mortified: there is nothing of Eros: the stimulus they arouse is the product of incorporeal, spectral psychic prostheses that cannot really mediate any authentic sexual-erotic occurrence: they provoke dreamlike itches that indefinitely re-propose a paralysis of genital sexuality, anesthetizing it to the point of physiological impotence.
They do not produce a real, strong, and conscious erotic imagination; they are empty, solitary, lethal fantasies that betray the natural elementary vitality of the instinctual drives of genital sexuality.
It is precisely the common use of an alienated and alienating sexual fantasy that prevents the authentic, original experience of the power intrinsic to natural sexuality. In this, the mysterious and violent power of Eros is potentially present, the immediate experience of which is possible only if one is capable of realizing a truly creative imagination, or rather one that has the virtue of evoking the mystery of Eros and leading us to a true embrace with the Other.

The stereotyped images of sexuality proposed by the metropolitan universe, fashion, pornography… prevent desire from having an authentic relationship with the nature of the life of another, different existence, with the different, unreachable reality of the other; they preclude the possibility of realizing a relationship of conjugation in which one has the paradoxical, ineffable experience of one’s own identity which, while remaining such, assumes the other without merging or separating.
In the act of painting, in its physical sensoriality, I seek the narrow path through which to experience a real erotic fulfillment.”

From a conversation with V. Slepoj, Arte & Eros, Playboy, December 2003 cit., p. 56

“[…] He has, however, learned that it is possible to grasp life through thought if one does not have the will to overpower it, if one uses no violence against it or against our ideas, if—almost in an evangelical sense—one becomes a child, regaining a spontaneity that is not constructed but somatized, similar to that of an expert pianist whose hands seem to fly effortlessly across the keyboard. Pinto thus looks at things as they take shape in lines and colors through an ascetic exercise and a deliberate solitude, ‘estranging’ himself from the logic of the market and consumption (which, moreover, he experienced firsthand when he was involved in advertising). […]”

Remo Bodei, in Cat. Di fronte e attraverso. Antologica di Bruno Pinto, edited by Pietro Bellasi and Giampiero Giacomini, with contributions by Bruno Corà, Marco Meneguzzo, Claudio Cerritelli, Guido Magnaguagno, Norbert Nobis, Dieter Ronte, Mazzotta, Milan 2005, op. cit., p. 37.

“[…] Pinto’s work is a long-term project. The works scream their will to evolve. They need time. Through this process, each work becomes more multifaceted, richer, and increasingly layered upon itself in favor of an expanded expressiveness. […]
At first glance, these works cannot be investigated; they cannot be understood.
They elude a quick glance. They are not traffic lights transmitting signals. They are testimonies of a profoundly cultural thought.”

Dieter Ronte, in Cat. Di fronte e attraverso. Antologica di Bruno Pinto, edited by Pietro Bellasi and Giampiero Giacomini, with contributions by Bruno Corà, Remo Bodei, Claudio Cerritelli, Guido Magnaguagno, Marco Meneguzzo, Norbert Nobis, Mazzotta, Milan 2005, p. 328.

“[…] I find that the most extraordinary hallmark of the discourse you convey through your works is precisely this idea of ‘coming’, of the mysterious point of suture between chance and destiny, the contingent and the necessary. […] Like a field of tensions in equilibrium: an interstice in which the watershed between time and eternity is produced. And it is in that interstitial space that the event occurs. Something ‘arrives’ […] I imagine God as the bursting forth of the event, through that interstice: as that which suddenly comes toward us, passing through a dangerously minimal margin […].”

Giacomo Marramao, in From a conversation between Bruno Pinto and Giacomo Marramao, in Di fronte e attraverso. Antologica di Bruno Pinto, Mazzotta, Milan 2005 cit., p. 291.

“[…] In wisdom traditions, it is true, there is the light of recognition: there are the two lights. But reciprocity, and therefore the dimension of the body, is not yet fully present. The corporeality of the perceiver, and also that of the things perceived, ultimately fail to achieve consistency. In you, a fully unfolded reciprocity is announced. In which reality, which is body, takes shape, and through which the light comes and goes. […]
Augustine, in De Trinitate, wishes to see God in the mirror of reality […] but the light then becomes blinding. And Augustine cannot see within it. Why? Because the dimension of the body is missing. But when it is abandoned, the light has nowhere to reflect; it no longer comes and goes: it dazzles. You perform an operation that is imbued with Christ, who is the Word, the light made flesh: with Him, you let the light pass through the flesh. […] It is the dawn of the new that is happening. I am convinced that if we look at the world with the right eye, where regressive forces leading toward implosion seem prevalent, we are actually witnessing a birth.
An art form such as yours is the light of the dawn that is beginning to break, […] the human that is already divine expresses itself in you. […]”

Piero Coda, The Two Lights: A Dialogue between Bruno Pinto and Piero Coda, in Facing and Through: An Anthology of Bruno Pinto, edited by Pietro Bellasi and Giampiero Giacomini, with contributions by Bruno Corà, Remo Bodei, Claudio Cerritelli, Guido Magnaguagno, Norbert Nobis, Dieter Ronte, Mazzotta, Milan 2005 cit., p. 285.

“[…] Like an animal captivated by calls, more attentive to the path and its tracks than to what it will encounter at the destination, Pinto considers it fundamental in the observational experience exercised by others that it be fulfilled by consuming itself in the encounter with one’s own, traversing the same places, overcoming the same obstacles, conquering the same hesitations, and facing many ‘trials’. […]
In the simultaneity of ‘facing and through’, the first necessity that manifests itself is that of an all-encompassing reflection facing and through his work. Pinto’s painting, while exhibiting a vast amount of qualified surface with intense material applications, calls for particular attention to its disruptive corporeality. What follows individual perception more than any other stimulus is the density of the physical presence of the painting. This offers itself in a quantity that instantaneously transforms into an invasive quality that does not allow one to remain indifferent.
The call of tactile and olfactory provocation, and in a broad sense of listening-feeling addressed to all the senses, is such that the eye and above all the mind are induced into a continuous drift from one area to another of his highly articulated drafting, in a classificatory intent of the executive methods provoking the always great, and in some cases abnormal, perceptive stimulus […]… they introduce into the work certain formal geographies leaning towards an organicity that excludes any element foreign to painting. […] Faithful to sensory perception, Pinto’s journey keeps pace with his open gaze on reality as an ontologically founding practice.
The need for adherence to the ‘trunk of existence’ pushes Pinto toward an awareness of meaning through daily pictorial and plastic practice […].”

Bruno Corà, in Cat. Di fronte e attraverso. Antologica di Bruno Pinto, edited by Pietro Bellasi and Giampiero Giacomini, with contributions by Remo Bodei, Claudio Cerritelli, Guido Magnaguagno, Marco Meneguzzo, Norbert Nobis, Dieter Ronte, Mazzotta, Milan 2005, p. 39.

“[…] And I am impressed. Paintings of a strength, or rather violence, unknown to me. I am pleased to see that these are large paintings, almost frescoes. I see him painting kneeling on the floor; I imagine the physical vehemence and the inner passion. Here one, a painter, embodies his existence. I perceive it as threatened and as a threat.

Cuts, carvings, traces, scars. Yes, scars. Flowers of evil? Screams of beauty? Lust and torture, pain and pleasure. Banished nervousness, modeled high tension. Painting pervaded by a current. Vital current, blood circulation, heartbeat. Rivulets, scratches. The inner structure contains the “all over” and vice versa. Searching for something comparable, perplexed, my thoughts turn to Dubuffet.
It is strange, but Matisse also appears. And a reference to Schiele? Perplexed: useful?
“After the silence” the floodgates break, the syzygy tide bursts into the painting, irrepressible. But the delicacy of the colors and their purpose, and the desperation and chaos, maintain an equilibrium that alone defines this art.
Crucifixion and ascension to heaven. The brutality and the lucid correspondence—this painter and this painting suffer and rejoice.
Only rarely have I admired such painting, which lunges at and simultaneously involves the observer. A torture and a grace.

Existential expression. Coarctation.
But also redemption.
What courage, dear unknown Bruno Pinto. “Heavens! Take off your hats! I am
leaving!”. An Italian-style Mayakovsky.
From the guitar with broken strings, the music murmurs.”

Guido Magnaguagno, in Cat. Di fronte e attraverso. Antologica di Bruno Pinto, edited by Pietro Bellasi and Giampiero Giacomini, with contributions by Bruno Corà, Remo Bodei, Claudio Cerritelli, Marco Meneguzzo, Norbert Nobis, Dieter Ronte, Mazzotta, Milan 2005, op. cit., p. 49.

“At first glance expressionist, and abstract expressionist, his works are instead strongly structured. Structured and deconstructed, like a geological map of a highly seismic territory, […] where situations collide, collapse, and recompose into another balance, until the next telluric shock. It is a precarious balance that we see in Pinto’s works… but balance nonetheless… and balance is but a step away from harmony.
This fury that is read at first sight in his paintings is, in fact, controlled wisdom: and control is exercised by the entire being—and not only by the intellect—over the movement of the hand. […]
Thus, a compositional capacity that could be automatic, that is, it might not pass through the direct filter of the mind, of culture, of craftsmanship: it is the synthetic automatism of one who has trained the instinct neither to overpower nor to be overpowered, and has trained himself to take instinct into account without being overwhelmed by it.
Probably, it is above all this that we envy him.”

Marco Meneguzzo, in Cat. Di fronte e attraverso. Antologica di Bruno Pinto, edited by Pietro Bellasi and Giampiero Giacomini, with contributions by Bruno Corà, Remo Bodei, Claudio Cerritelli, Guido Magnaguagno, Norbert Nobis, Dieter Ronte, Mazzotta, Milan 2005, op. cit., p. 53.

“[…] End is not a familiar word to Bruno Pinto […] Each of Pinto’s works, rather than marking a milestone or a precise point of arrival, represents a transitory moment within a constantly evolving dialogue between the painter himself and the world, or rather, between all the painter’s selves that succeed one another over time and the world. With such premises, it seems reductive to speak of a final production, as we are faced with a reflective and creative continuum in which the negation of the finite translates not only into the unfinished but also into the infinite: like the evolution of thought, the elaboration of painting is also endless. The concept of the Infinite cannot fail to evoke the dimension of the divine through its opposition to human finiteness, so that Pinto’s work also becomes a contemplative operation and a symbol of the confrontation/encounter between the self and God, and his painting a continuous tension toward an other or beyond dimension. […]”

Lorenza Miretti, “Difficile chiamarli semplicemente ultimi”, Mete, 9, no. 3 (Bologna 2015), pp. 84-86

“[…] Pinto’s works on paper are not a secondary or temporary practice, but a true daily artistic practice, an investigation in and with the mark. And if his painting may appear “extreme,” in the large drawings on display, especially the black and white ones, one notices a less pained harmony, a balance achieved, however precarious, a continuous discovery. In these works on paper, there is no struggle between the conceptual and executive moments; on the contrary, the two moments meet in the artist’s gesture, in the movement of the hand that gives birth to the image. Because behind these marks and forms lies the bodily gesture: the hands, when they draw, think and move; the mark is linked to manual experience, it is a deeply physical necessity, not just a necessity of thought. What Artaud said comes to mind: “a drawing is a machine that has breathed.”

Maura Pozzati, in Video Cat. BRUNO PINTO – KNOWLEDGE AND DESTINY – Works on Paper, edited by Paolo Donini and Stefano Massari, contributions by Pier Damiano Ori, critical intervention by Maura Pozzati, directed and produced by Stefano Massari, Pavullo 2012

“[…] Painting, not representation or transfiguration. Neither a self-referential surface, but rather becoming matter, form, and color of being-with.

[…] He paints a land no longer filled with terror. Not an abstractly pacified world, because he passes through catastrophe, through the overturning of a space traversed on foot and, simultaneously, flown over without attempting to dominate it, and above all without seeking a horizon. There is the earth’s crust, and the reverse of that crust is the sky. That crust is the sky. This is clearly seen in the whites: they are plaster, snow, fog, clouds, mist.
Before Pinto’s paintings, one experiences a sense of happiness, of effectively conquered freedom in which constraint and bonds are not annulled, nor do they concede anything to the pleasantness of the material or the mark; it is a work rich in forms, colors, and a variety of densities of the pictorial surface that becomes vastness, a landscape of inspiration and expiration of things-with-things, of freedom-with-limit, a search for the friction between limit and limit, of things being back to back, of their being skin against skin, of their touching and pressing against one another, bringing this friction into being within the body that is the work. The central role of the line appears here. Initially, the material fields are immediately noticeable. Then one notices that there is always a line that delimits the different surfaces. […] It is first and foremost a point of contact between one and the other, a point of gathering for both, a point of junction. […]”

Jean Soldini, A Testa in giù, per un’ontologia della vita in comune, preface by René Schérer, Mimesis n. 195, Milan-Udine 2012, op. cit., p. 36

“[…] For thirty, thirty-five years, Pinto has been working, constantly revisiting all the great painting of the past and transforming, in his paintings, everything he has managed to understand at a profound level (of the essence). […] It is the hand of an artist who speaks of himself in relation to the world, through his human experience and, as always, it is from his suffering, his solitude, his ability to meditate on art (and one could say: it is from his willingness to love and to walk the paths of others’ thoughts) that creative power springs forth.
His choice is that of silence; he keeps himself far from artistic worldliness; he forcefully confronts violent relationships with the world and prefers the future that arises from rigor in authentic research. It is always thus for those who demand the truth, and there is no doubt that in this dimension, faith in man interacting with the cosmos is supremely exalted. […]
For him, painting is the only way to find relationships with others, and only in isolation does one come to understand (he comes to understand) what the real conditions of the work of many great artists may have been. In this detachment from modernity, it is possible to gradually rediscover all the paths that remain indelibly impressed in the works that found the World.
This work of reflection thus leads away from that opaque monster of artists, that monster always lying in wait called ‘madness’. […] When one enters that great door of madness where the faculties of willing, thinking, and feeling collide, it is also possible not to find the dimension of silence again, but to remain entangled in successive and interminable series of regressions, without ever reaching the goal, that of pacification between oneself and the world.
Only in the abyss of levels that are even more abyssal, so to speak, in the archetypes or in the spirituality of ancient cultures and traditions, does the artist dig backward toward his ontological peak, modeling that integration which allows things themselves to reveal themselves in the transparency of silence, and thus to be perceived in their naturalness, in their being as they are. […]
With the strategy of opposites and in the formulation of experience at the base of all knowledge, Pinto intends to tear through every mystification and to make every one of his intuitions current.
When the veil of evasiveness becomes a layer, there is nothing left but to fall to pieces or to violate once again the enigmatic form that reproduces, perhaps in painting, things and their ‘intended’ truth.”

Patrizia Vicinelli, Una diversità eccellente, Parol Quaderni d’Arte 3, Bologna March 1987

“[…] I enter his studio: large black and white papers.
Sedimentation. I do not understand how they are made—the paper seems like wood, plaster, or a wall. The paper is heavy and swallows ‘things’ that I no longer recognize, perhaps because they are too well known. Still lifes? […].
Everything is horizontal in its narrative but vertical as a totemic icon, also because they are worked from multiple points of view. Everything is opaque and vibrant. […]
Painting is painting; it is a ‘thing’, it is an object, and it can only be encountered by chance if obsessively sought after. Painting desires to be unearthed and revealed, even unbeknownst to itself.
The exhibition will not be a spectacle, an ephemeral assembly and alignment of works, but will occur as an extension and enlargement of the studio and the atelier; it will carry with it faults, mistakes, erasures, smells, and sorrows.
The visitor will understand that the painter is a wise old wandering hermit who returns humble, ‘insecure’, and ‘unknowing’ to the first brushstroke. Perhaps that visitor will find no novelty in form, no future acceleration; on the contrary, the images have all already occurred in the history of painting. The painter never invents a new stone, a new landscape. There is no such thing as a neo-stone or a post-landscape or a thinning of history in a still life.
One makes the stone, one immerses oneself in one’s own landscape, one lives with one’s own nature which highlights our own end. Painting is wonderful for this: one always starts first because one is the first to have caressed and touched that stone, even if it was created and recreated many times by others.
P.S. I forgot to mention that I was in Bruno Pinto’s studio… but what matters are the works, their desire, their necessity to be painting, and not the surnames, the names, the categorizations, and the homologations, as a painter never exploits another painter, nor exhibits fascist attitudes by quarantining him or trapping him on his own path. Only the painting is central; the artist can also be lateral and must be proud of this.”

Concetto Pozzati, in Cat. Bruno Pinto. Opere dal 1953 al 1987, edited by Claudio Cerritelli, foreword by Filippo Sassoli dè Bianchi, with writings by Enrico Cesare Gori, Concetto Pozzati, Luciano Nanni, Bruno Bandini, Vezio Ruggeri, Giuseppe Dossetti, Bruno Pinto. Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1987 cit., p. 42

“ […] Pinto paints a land, a redeemed matter, a new beginning.
He paints a land no longer filled with terror, no longer filled with catastrophe. Not an abstractly pacified world, because he passes through catastrophe to reach something from which we can truly begin again. […] Pinto paints a land, a redeemed matter, a new beginning paid for by a passion for finiteness, by a passion that passes through finiteness and that is a love for finiteness. In his painting, there are only things made new, which we fail to see as being made new.
This is the infinite that we fail to see within the finite, which is why we are neither mystical nor aesthetic. […] Pinto’s painting confronts us with this inability of ours,
while endlessly adjusting its aim with the claim of grasping the Other that is worth seeking beneath old and new ghosts because it is safe. Safe beneath our rubble, […]. However, one must be aware that Art must be ready to recognize that it carries within itself a guilt toward the Other, and that it must necessarily assume an ever-greater responsibility. […]
The objective of criticism, of the word that seeks to say something about art, must be to create the conditions for looking for a long time; and looking for a long time is participation, even if our activist and cerebral society, in its foolishness, has made us forget it. What Pinto shows us is essential for our survival.”

Jean Soldini, in Cat. Di fronte e attraverso. Antologica di Bruno Pinto, edited by Pietro Bellasi and Giampiero Giacomini, with contributions by Bruno Corà, Remo Bodei, Claudio Cerritelli, Guido Magnaguagno, Marco Meneguzzo, Norbert Nobis, Dieter Ronte, Mazzotta, Milan 2005, cit., p. 73.

“There are human experiences that, although they necessarily unfold over time, do not adhere to its relentless progression, failing to mark the stages of their evolution toward a goal within its arc. One might say instead that at every point, the inner vector of such existences tends to deviate from the straight line. […] The nature of this arrest cannot be defined by a formula, but it can generally be said that it results from an event that cannot be understood by a simple act of the intellect. This is, I believe, the case for the human and artistic journey of Bruno Pinto. […]
The fact is that Pinto’s artistic gesture indicates a direction that is hardly compatible with the premises of the experimentalism of the last century.
His painting possesses rather an archaic quality, foreign to any psychologism, lyricism, or conceptualism.” What manifests in his works is the expression of a contemplative act in which the alterity of subject and object tends to resolve into a cognitive relationship, or rather, in the recognition that the other—the object—truly exists, not as a pure appearance of manipulable forms, but as an entity that challenges the subject, forcing them to become aware of the nature of their volitions. Thus, it is an ascetic exercise through which the artifices of the mind and the impulsive reactions of the will are arrested and reduced to silence. […]”

Giancarlo Gaeta, “Bruno Pinto”, I Martedì n.1- (Bologna 2004), p. 3