(Vimercate, Monza 1935–2013)
Bianco, signed, dated Bonalumi 78 on the reverse, shaped canvas, vinyl tempera, 130 x 100 cm, on stretcher, (PP)

Photo certificate:
Archivio Bonalumi, Milan, 20. 1. 80, archive no. 78–033, with artist’s signature

Exhibited:
Mantua, Bonalumi, Palazzo Te, 1980, exhibition catalogue page 42;
Ferrara, Bonalumi, Padiglione di Arte Contemporanea, 1985, exhibition catalogue, ill. no. 8 (no page number)

“Doubt is tension that finds its expression in research. The work of art is a manifestation of its overcoming and yet doubts still affect it, creating more doubts and new hypotheses”. This idea expressed by Agostino Bonalumi in 1977 seems to find an echo in the work entitled Bianco, (‘white’), executed the following year. In this work, the ‘extroflexion’ is made dynamic by the wooden centrings emerging from the back of the canvas, parallel elements that modulate the surface and create rhythmic light effects. And yet, within this formal rigour, a diagonal break interrupts this seemingly infinite rhythm longitudinally, and seems to express the “doubt” the artist mentioned before, a doubt that characterises every research and is necessary to create incessant experimentation, the continuous tension that manifests itself in the single work of art without exhausting itself in it. The 1970s represent for Bonalumi a period of research of the object-form, in which the choice of colour for the pictorial surfaces is combined with the different perceptions deriving from sculptural experimentation.