To observe these most recent works by Bruto Pomodoro -although perhaps one ought to say ‘to contemplate’, taking up the author’s own standpoint – seems to impose a reasoning regarding the symmetries of representation which is visually given by way of opposites. As if the aim, for example, were that of ‘advancing’ by’ way of variations of images which ought to present themselves as being unvarying while instead – and this is the point – they are placed in a critical position by the symbolic use that is made of them.

And we are certainly talking about a geometrical symbolism thanks to which it is always the overall structure of the work that emerges first and quite evidently – the ‘plot’, or the ‘grid’ or else the scheme (and almost didactic, a cataloguing of an objective type): something which would encourage one in favour of an abstracting, “optical” perception were it not for the fact that within these field definitions one has the irruption of contradictory elements of an organic type.

From among which – and obsessively there is the form of the egg, a true generative nucleus, the signal/ indication of a process of transformation (as symbolic as it is biological), one that is continuous but as if closed up within a system. And it is perhaps not fortuitous that these elements which insistently allude to the genetic code are almost always exhibited “apart”, circumscribed, like exemplary samples of that series of events which even work contemplate”. As if each work were a moment – and immobilized – of the replication, mutation, selection, etc., represented there. And in whatever case, it is as if each moment were the origin. I think that it is in this sense that Bruto Pomodoro talks about biological archetypes.

From the formal point of view, the painting expresses itself with total coherence (if one can put it that way, given its rigorous antiemotional clarity). The colour is distended, controlled, not “expressive”, in this way underlining scansions of the geometrical system. And the colour only ‘softens’ itself in the mellowed and accurate shadings which are exclusively reserved for the elements of an organic sort that are articulated in the spiral, the helix or the flower in a mechanism of vin and yang, simulating complexity and movement. In only one case does Bruto Pomodoro go so far as to naturalistically describe an open egg, showing us its interior, the yolk as heart, the physiological valence of all the reasoning underlying his painting. And, unexpectedly, the effect is so strong as to seem surreal, hallucinated.

If – as is also possible – we are dealing with “small alchemical theatres” then it is from this game or play of contrasting presence that one attains the fascination of images which narrate a progress transfixed in immobility. And it is probably upon this that one has the founding of the decision of defining a similar play of reflections – internal external, etc. – with the term “contemplations” which at one and the same time suggests an attitude/ approach of ecstatic distance and a profound involvement within the stupor of the thing observed. In conclusion, one could advance the hypothesis that Bruto Pomodoro is attempting to visually reconstruct the ‘plots’ or ‘threads’ of an enigmatic process of growth between the unfathomable will of chance and the tremendous, impersonal law of necessity.

Roberto Sanesi

Cesena, Riccione, Siena, 1997