30s and 40s
“I paint for a call back in time. So far back in time that I sometimes think that it arose before me and has come towards me when I was still in the world of the unconscious.
When I perform this ancient act, I hear an inner scream as though coming from someone who got lost and frightened, and then my inner search becomes spontaneous and desperate until I manage to find a way out and I am finally relieved of a heavy weight.
I became a painter since my early childhood, when my mother, a “brimstone miner” with the heart of a saint and rough but generous and caressing hands, held me close to her in an attic to keep me away from other naughty boys, rascals [...] and so I spent my entire childhood in that attic. I vividly remember that I would stare the surrounding environment for long endless hours, in a mysterious wonder and awe, an environment that was strangely characterized by the presence of old and large beams from which hundreds of ropes and pieces of old cloth dangled into bizarre contortions looking like lianas in a skyless forest [...]. Still today my twisted, broken and shattered figures are involuntarily evocative of that time, resembling countless ghosts that were lit in my primeval imagination, when a ray of light entered the attic and lit a shred of cloth stained with various colors, waving from the beams.”
( Aldo Borgonzoni, Bologna, April 10, 1946 in Borgonzoni, edited by Lamberto Priori, cat. Exhibition in Bologna, Chronicles Gallery, 1946)
Aldo Borgonzoni is an artist with an inclination to figurative narrative art inspired by reality, also with symbolic and anthropological meanings. Aldo Borgonzoni is the interpreter of a dramatic poetics telling the outer and inner story of human life, which finds its best stylistic expression in European, especially German and Italian, Expressionism. While the colour palette seeks to express emotional perturbations, inspired, more or less consciously, from French Fauvism. In the late thirties of the twentieth century he made a study trip to Munich and Nuremberg, which left an indelible expressionist mark on all his future career as a painter, though, upon his arrival at Bologna, the works by the Tuscan Lorenzo Viani affected his artistic sensitivity.
“1930 is a very important date for me because it is the year when I left Medicina. I had already made a few working experiences as a craftsman, I was first a shop boy, then a carpenter and then a carver. Then during the last year I finally became a composer printer. But all this made me impatient and restless, since I deeply craved to become a painter.
As soon as I arrived at Bologna I could not immediately work as a painter, so I had to find a job in order to make a living out of it and to pay back the sacrifices made by my mother. As a matter of fact, from 1930 to 1940, I worked for Enea Stefani, a goldsmith and engraver. He became in a way my Master. His workshop was in Via San Felice, in Bologna. So what did that experience mean? A craftsmanship experience, whose ancient techniques, flowing from the Renaissance to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to the neoclassical age, provided me with a great opportunity to learn the great skills of the trade, to learn all those techniques that had been at the very basis of the Renaissance painters’ training, through apprenticeship in the goldsmiths' workshops. So, in that sense that is how I was trained. But I must also add that in 1930 I enrolled at the Art Institute of via Cartolerie and I attended the evening classes until 1930, when I qualified as master of art. So my primary experience started in 1930 and beginnings were sometimes quite difficult. I arrived at Bologna as a child and my first encounters were with painters, such as Guido Bugli or Norma Mascellani. But the main information means - let us say it - remained the exhibitions. And the exhibitions of that period were the trade union exhibitions promoted by the Fascist Trade Union of Fine Arts, namely a broad organization of the figurative arts culture. Then there were, so to speak, other centers of culture, such as the Gallery of Modern Art, which was then located at Villa delle Rose, directed by Zucchini. It provided a whole overview of the nineteenth-century culture, which by the way was the basis of the mainstream culture. That is to say that the city of Bologna as a whole reflected the ways, techniques and poetics of a mainstream culture, ranging from Coriolano Vighi to Luigi Bertelli, Luigi Bertelli’s son, Flavio, to the more official and contemporary culture of my time, from 1930 to 1940, which roughly reflected the ways of the nineteenth century. Yet, there was a great character at the Gallery of Modern Art inVilla delle Rose who immediately impressed me, even though he was not very well-known at that time. You could see the expressionist cartoons by Lorenzo Viani portraying pupils studying on school desks. They were frantic, dynamic, restless children, who clearly conveyed a sense of rebelliousness to all that kind of culture that I had mentioned before. Yet that kind of culture, which featured academic characters, as well as outstanding and also premium pictorial characters, was part of an order of normality of language. Lorenzo Viani gave shocks and blows... he was a true earthquake. This is my first impression as a young painter arriving at Bologna: Lorenzo Viani.”
(Resca’s Interview to Aldo Borgonzoni on behalf of RADIO BOLOGNA, above-mentioned, Courtesy Archives and Research Centre Aldo Borgonzoni )
“I often attended the Villa delle Rose gallery. I liked it very much because I found good painting that led me to reflect and make future choices. In particular, a set of cartoons painted by Lorenzo Viani, portraying pupils at work, impressed me deeply. Children were frantic, restless, with harsh expressionist features, meant to deeply upset the quiet and right-thinking mainstream culture with their deforming and expressive power. Lorenzo Viani’s work was like an earthquake, and remained a clear and steady point of reference for me.”
(A. Borgonzoni, From the rural areas of lowlands (Medicina) to urban setting (Bologna), in Bologna during the 1930-40’s, in “Proceedings and Memoirs of the Clementine Academy of Bologna” in XVI, Bologna, 1983, p. 42 )
