Curator

Maria Bonomi: Peregrine Printmaking

New transformations spring from spatial interplays, based on the page/musical score of Oriental writing. Maria’s updating of the musical scores takes place through the displacement and overprinting of small matrices with diverse outlines, allowing for countless prints. Thus, the signs of oriental writing dance on the sheet of paper and create the version Tropicália (1994).

[...]

She has taken print-making out of office spaces and imbued it with a presence compatible with and integrated to the scale of modern and contemporary architecture - a sort of counterpart to the billboard.

Her works constitute large impressions of geometric forms in tension, juxtaposed as tracks, as conductors of energy and drives, as vibrating mechanisms or mechanisms in motion. This is an oeuvre that articulates intelligence and sensibility. It reconciles the crudeness and the direct communication of great blocks of cut and tinted wood with the delicate impression of elaborate color combinations on rice paper - a fragile, feminine support which evoked the oriental graphic tradition. Maria Bonomi's prints represent a moment of radical affirmation of these medium in contemporary art, a breaking of boundaries, for they carry East and West within them, masculine and feminine, balance and unbalance.


Ivo Mesquita, 2005.
PINACOTECA: 100 Anos: Destaques do Acervo.
São Paulo, Prêmio, 2005.

It is no longer possible to think of making a work in the quiet of your own room and give it to a collector, for instance, who will just look at it. l have suddenly grown very close to certain people who are seeking the dream of coexistence. l do not believe that the development of art occurs in any way other than through public art. l believe it is the only way. Public art, collective art. Of course you cannot take a work from the studio, put it in the middle of a square and say it is public art. It isn't, because it wasn't conceived for that place.

We can no longer continue to contemplate our navels, especially not in Brazil, where we coexist with tragedy. Let us not pretend that we are an elite, educated audience, painting its watercolors and experiencing its glorious memories of the week of 22. It just isn't possible.

I shared that space on three levels. And then I entered the memory of the Estacao da Luz and one hundred years’ worth of lost objects. I had access to the archives and I represented them in the panel. Thousands of people worked with me, engraved those objects. There are dentures, frogs, roots, wheelchairs bridal veils, you name it. A world — all of it recovered and symbolized. The next step in the work that guided the Epopéia Paulista [Sao Paulo Epic] will lake place ln a house that stands in front of the Tom Jobim music school, a house that was once a large, three-story whorehouse and will become a studio housing ten artists a year, live from the interior and five from the city of Sao Paulo, who will do visual work on the immediate environment of that location. It is important that they live together there. It ls important that people be attracted to something that cannot he found everywhere - the extraordinary.

Nowadays, art must be political. And it is a politics of art. And we must not be late. The whole world is doing this — it has grown aware of the debt. We cannot exclude people from their own sensibility or deny them means of finding themselves [or one another] on another level. Even if they choose other things, they must be given the opportunity. It's like having access to health, to hygiene, to literacy.

I know of events that cost more than a library, or more than a public art work both of which are things that truly bring about transformation. The concept of events consumes a great deal or money in a poor country where we should be doing things that we do not manage to do. In my opinion, we ought to have less events and more cultural facts. Funds should be allocated to things that stay, to efforts for making things happen physically and permanently. To leave the cultural-ephemeral for the cultural-substantial a situation that might even include the ephemeral, but not the ephemeral alone. I am terribly afraid of ephemeral culture, which seems to something of a trend in Brasilia today. Let us put on great festivals. And what then? What next? Why not, then, have more long-running shows and more theaters? Why is there no funding for libraries, orchestras and long seasons of popular concerts? Where can we talk about these things? ...Over the internet? Where shall i be heard? Such tremendous contradictions are hard to digest. There is is Brazil that has turned its back on Brazil. And it is the cultural Brazil. We know It in our bones. As individuals we have the ability to move beyond what are doing if the institutions were doing their part.



Maria Bonomi, 2005.

Bodies are cities and cities are bodies. A possible reading of this body transposed onto lines of red sand, upon an asphalt surface, with sheets of clay that gather the marks of history and everyday life as faithfully as possible: sheets of clay that are disseminated on the body upon which marks are engraved like some transaction between the interiority and exteriority. Along with photographic and verbal capture, they make up this urban score that unfolds - as it passes - through streets, houses and neighborhoods. That text deals with memory, not the competition of great battles but of small daily metamorphoses: water meter lids, soda can pop tops embedded in asphalt, the Venetian mosaics of New Venice or even sewer drains. I followed the process by which Brazilian artist Maria Bonomi recreated her contact with this city she loves and welcomed in the Clay Biennials.

Weaving the many threads of these feelings, Maracaibo left marks on her that she wanted to print with materials, that were both typical and readily available. By resorting to her senses, along with artists from her working crew, she was able to smell, touch, and feel skin and textures through the use of touch, the most immediate sense.

Maria confessed to me that the contact between bodies and cities cannot be completely defined by words or figuration or realism. The many threads that make up the sensitive network of lines accommodate themselves to the mesh of current or original figures. Figures that must be looked at from the highest ground (as in Nazca) with geometries that are reminiscent of pre-Hispanic abstractions, that meld in subterranean asphalt passages the odor of which tinge the environment, like that of the city itself, making us see all this beyond what is contained within our urban contemporaneousness.


Victor Fuenmayor, 2004.
FUENMAYOR, Victor. “Piel de la Ciudad”.
In: V Edición Barro de América. Maracaibo,
Centro de Arte de Maracaibo Lía Bermudez, dic. 2004.

[...]

However, she is not attracted by the speed of lithographic execution; she transfers the nervous gestures of action painting to the woodcut with totally original results. The black stain of the matrix on paper and the white stains of the incisions on the matrix, which at times have the freedom of a drip painting, create complex yet controlled structures. The next period begins in 1963, with the Situações [Situations] and culminates in the Paris and Munich exhibitions of 1967; smooth wooden slats used as matrixes, by juxtaposition, brilliant colors, the prints gain the wall, competing with the visual impact of paintings. The new scale is definitely acknowledged; it devours that of the poster and the intention of an art for the multitude becomes implicit. This does not occur out of mere ideological demand but by virtue of a coherent evolution, over the course of a decade that represents a trajectory uncommon in the recent art of this country.

The panels in concrete are born from that: Maria Bonomi finds in them a point of fusion between her “public prints" and brutalist architecture - a fusion already intuited by Artigas, who put a Bonomi print on the ramp to the FAU-USP building.

Apparent concrete becoming the support for a new type of print, accentuates its sculptural nature. Print-making reaches the limit of its unfolding in space. It is an important chapter in the relationship between art and urbanism in São Paulo.



Lorenzo Mammi, 2004.
MAMMI, Lorenzo. Maria Bonomi.
São Paulo, Centro Universitário Maria Antônia,
29 abr./13 jun. 2004.

[...]

One need only look at the works of Maria Bonomi currently on exhibition at the Tetraz show in order to be certain that Brazilian engraving contains the paths that lead us to a forgotten identity.

They are four medium-sized works along panels or photographs and accumulations [piles?] of beaten earth, symbolizing everything from the disarray of progress to man's negligence towards Mother Nature. At one point, the spectator is even encouraged to thrust a knife into one of the mounds. Murder or resurrection, it does not matter: the link between the most rational of beings and his habitat must be immediately re-considered. [...]

The sinuous quality of Maria Bonomi's works immediately establishes a dialogue with various schools of Brazilian print-making over the course of decades. It therefore allows for the recollection of its ascendancy and the identity spaces inscribed within its grooves and silences.

[...]

Both the works on exhibition at the Tetraz and those which make up her fine and vast oeuvre, the works of Maria Bonomi always bear the emblem of her ascendancy and her commitment to volume, rhythm and —why not?— narrative — are redolent of the finest Brazilian print-making.

The way she centers objects or subjects in her compositions; the surroundings she uses as supports: abrupt cuts, as in shot sequences; plus the silences or densities that are part of the narrative - these components generate a work at once contemporary and rich in dialogue with the tradition.

The Tetraz works abound in smiles and in the construction of kinetic planes. They contain references to a rural universe and its knife and blade imagery, even as it plays with the reflections and rhythms suggested by the theme.

Outstanding print-maker that she, Bonomi does not abandon that which moves the support and has proven to be both indignant and politically committed, in her own sophisticated way- a mindset that has long since vanished from Brazilian painting - currently almost always reflecting a truly aseptic view of the world.


Miguel de Almeida, 2003
ALMEIDA, Miguel de. “A Gravura como Ação Política”.
Gazeta Mercantil, São Paulo, 15, 16, 17 ago. 2003.

Despite the distance between periods as diverse as those of the Renaissance and contemporary art, certain technological, operational and artistic challenges remain the same.

Born in 1452, Italian Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest geniuses in the entire history of mankind. At the age of 46, under the protection of Sforza, the Duke of Milan, he deemed the occasion auspicious tor sculpting a horse that would be the pride of an entire dynasty and - the monumentally challenging molded sculpture of clay overlaid onto an iron structure, pressed through a plaster mold into bronze.

Traditionally, the horse's matchless physical strength and the beauty of the animal at a gallop have symbolized transportation (of man and news), sportsmanship and even automobiles.

Yet history was cruel to the illustrious da Vinci, for the French destroyed the bust of the horse after they invaded Milan in 1499.

Leonardo later painted his most famous works, including The Adoration of the Magi, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. However, accounts of the day point out that, from the day his equestrian statue was destroyed, the artist's expression became a somber one. Not even the welcome given him by the French court, as one of its most recent proteges, was able to do away with his melancholy and he died in the arms of King Francis I of France at the age of 67.

Maria Bonomi, on the contrary, started her artistic career over again at the age of 67 with the physical vigor of a twenty-year-old woman and the intellectual and creative maturity of her true age. Currently celebrating 55 years of hot artistic career, dating from the first award she received In 1947, the artist produces an intriguing modality of Public Art, one which may be defined, in the history of Brazilian Art, as new, unexpected and unknown within this segment of work that relates the art object with the graphic arts and three-dimensional expression.

A Few months ago, Maria Bonomi received a challenging invitation from one of the most dynamic Brazilian companies in the economic-financial register and information sector - they wanted her to transform the "Ginete" trophy (20,0 x 16,0 x 4,0 cm), originally commissioned in 1994 by that same institution which now makes her the invitation as an award for financial system leaders. The proposition is to transform the small Ginete into a colossal work, whose new dimensions are four meters and forty centimeters in height, three meters fifty centimeters length and ten centimeters width. Actually, for a sculpture, these measurements would not be so extravagant, out for the work as created by the artist, yes.

The Ginete brings horse and horsemen well accommodated within an abstract figuration that composes the external identification of these two elements in a wild gallop. From this perspective, the work in question is a sculpture; however, the common definition of full relief is that of a three-dimensional work that may be observed from any point of view.

Maria Bonomi Ginete was not designed to be viewed from all perspectives, only from the front and the back for, seen from the sides, it resembles a crumpled leaf or misshapen plastic and the forms lose definition, the volume sometimes times increasing to a maximum measurement of 1,10m, at other times to the thickness of a mere 15cm. A discrepancy that challenges any imagination, for one sees the front and back of the horse and the horseman yet, it seen from a side view, they disappear in a flash. They are just an excuse for the use of their forms and external contours which, in this particular creation, are small groups of prints.

As for the engravings in clay, there is the violence at the tools in a flux of energy outside normal patterns because Maria Bonomi works with an expressive power as if she were telling us that every minute will be the last and we must take advantage of time, speed and the density of the forms of everyday life. This dynamics which is characteristic of her led the work in clay to be executed in a month and a half (weekends included) of almost non-stop labor. All this energy worried Antonio de Nobrega Filho who procured a safer scaffold and tied the artist to the marquee, despite her protests, Maria Bonomi worked so intensely that, when she finished, her entire body was covered with bruises and scratches.

The tools she uses go beyond the traditional repertory of sculpture and wood cut engraving. New work instruments were created exclusively for the Ginete and, with the help of specialized toolmakers, she constructed a veritable "arsenal" made up of computer pieces (the same ready-made procedure of the old Heróika print of the 1970's), stonecutters' tools with specially invented indentations, wooden cylinders (which produce an effect similar to that of wood block printed on paper with a u-gouge) and -- most bizarre and intriguing of all -- the use of rods carved at their extremities with a woodcut to provide texture and scoop out the clay. How exactly did she avail herself oi a wood block matrix to produce a new print‘? A procedure of lhis kind is revolutionary because it is a meta-creation, in other words, a creation of the creation. From this point on, might it be discrepant to institute he term a print of a print?

It is difficult to describe a work edified by some many disparate tools, instruments and objects used in formal compositional constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions which form a digital network digital and give sense and meaning to the whole.

What other contemporary artist has this know-how and similar attitudes?

Art History has in this artist parameters which should be studied most attentively.

The belief that a work of art can both highly pleasing and playful was demystified in the execution of the work in question, which should have been accomplished in a few months and stirred and mobilized the minds and bodies of a team of 31 individuals, not counting the artist herself.

Architect Rodrigo Velasco did the preliminary calculations for the foundation so that, in the first hangar [shed?] Otaviano Vila Nova Lima might weld the iron structure so that it would support the clay. The artist idealized and requested the confection of tools that were executed and adapted by José Foltran and Jairo Battaglia. The latter individual animated [?] and articulated the men who prepared the clay, including Wilson dos Santos Ribeiro, José Nilton Pereira dos Santos Filho and the helpful Manuel Jose de Oliveira who, once Maria's work was done, prepared the plaster and the plaster molds with Marco Antonio Pedrassa and Leandro Ribeiro da Silva, who did the final cleaning. Antonio de Nóbraga Filho was the catalyst who interacted with the artist and accompanied the entire process from the "clay-Ginete" to the "plaster-Ginete" and the “aluminum-Ginete".

The "plaster-Ginete" (which is the mold transposed aluminum) had to be transported to a large, traditional foundry located in the city of Piracicaba in the interior of Sao Paulo. Because this operation was so delicate, transportation required some twenty trips by the diligent Olimpio Femandes.

At the foundry, the next procedure involved an 8mm thick silicone treatment at the 22 plaster mold made layer by layer with the patient brushstrokes of Luiz Eduardo dos Santos and Benedito Elias Martins. The following stage was the silicone pressed into sand molds (which resembled the shells used in the film Cocoon) with compressed air, molded by Pedro Cesar Vitti, Fabio Augusto Forti and Luiz Eduardo dos Santos, and made to withstand the heat of melted aluminum. In the foundry, the battalion of men running around with their heavy buckets of "white gold" (the aluminum) towards the "cocoons" and the pouring of the silvery lava evoked a science nation film in which only the costumes and tense, expressions of the sweaty workers brought us back to reality. The brave “men of fire“ included Adalberto Luis Vicola, Alexandre Lulz dos Santos, Ezequiel da Silva Nascimento, Fabio Augusto Forti, Halul Thales Lucas, Jose Elias do Amaral, Luiz Eduardo dos Santos, Luiz Alberto dos Santos, Luiz Ronaldo Pinto, Pedro Cesar Vitti and Vanderlei A. Mariano Corrêa. After the"cocoons" were destroyed, each piece of the "aluminum-Ginete" was born from them. welded and structured internally by Moises Francisco and Paulo Cesar F. Borges.

At this point, the piece weighed a ton and a half and required fifteen men for lifting; it was the first time that the Ginete stood on its own. Everyone feared that it might fall over; ropes were loosened bit by bit and misgivings soon replaced by looks of satisfaction as horse and horseman stood imposingly and perfectly balanced; only the artist seemed tense and uneasy.

Could it have been the monumental weight or the work which took her by surprise at that moment or was it the shock of seeing the product of her imagination materialized in the metal engravings?

Finally, because welded aluminum is quite delicate and always leaves some after-effect or imperfection (erasure of textures), Maria Bonomi and Antonio do Nóbrega Filho supervised the reconstitution of Nivacir Aparecido Paiva and Josue Pedreira Feitosa reajustes, in the last passage, there was a polish by Luiz Aparecido Rigo, Paulo Cesar F. Borges, Reginaldo Aparecido Pedro and Anderson Aparecido C. de Oliveira; following which there was a new hand polish and the metal was given a protective bath by Ezequiel da Silva Nascimento, Adelson Lopes da Silva and Luiz Eduardo dos Santos.

The horse possesses the optical effect of kinetics, the real movement provoked not only by the perspective from each angle (Renaissance tradition) but, because of the textures and engraved grooves which, despite the grouping, fight amongst themselves to direct the spectator's gaze in many different directions. In this optical "seesaw", even when one is standing before the work one has the labyrinthine sensation of movement.

Because it was always more concerned with making painting and graphic design imitate movement by using distortions obtained through a play of different dimensions, colors, traditional perspective and, in most works, the use of geometry, the principles of the much-expired Kinetic Art of the twentieth century never quite arrived at this stage of development. Other varieties or Kinetic Art have used machines, motors and wind to move paintings, prints, sculptures and objects (mobiles) and allow the public to participate in the works by handling them.

Maria Bonomi is a medium unto herself, to wit an agent of her own media which (in this case) is virtual, kinetic, three-dimensional and graphic, and communicates by flash prints grouped together onto a sculptural support.

The horse's gallop is a great as the leap made by Maria Bonomi and the artistic rituals of her own design.

[...]

The "Ginete" carries within it the soul or Brazilians who pull together to do their best so that the country can progress despite countless uncertainties.


Marcela Matos Nhedo, 2002.

[...]

Our point of view is that prior to and beyond all boundaries there is a “graphic philosophy" that organizes the graphic "idea" and already contains the elements that will configure the image, whether it be two-dimensional, electronic, plane, progressive, subliminal, etc.

This “previous” graphic philosophy is totally flexible and encompassing and incorporates the most varied mediums, whether traditional or contemporary - fixed, movable or volatile images that will always possess a graphic nature. This is what we have explicitly noticed in our survey of the evolution of work presented at the most important triennials and biennials in the field (Prague, Ljubljana, Krakow, Sapporo, Tokyo, etc) when the concept or title of print clearly unfolds and takes on new designs.

Perhaps the indication of a graphic poetics as a way of defining contemporary procedures is more appropriate to the present day. What we are seeking to emphasize is that it is the idea at the generating base which prevails of the media. It is the graphic project and product in and of itself. The idea is the matrix and vice verse.

The tendency towards a strong division between the paths of the search of Contemporary Printmaking and Traditional Printmaking has become palpable, but we can affirm that it is above all because of an intentional resistance through lack of knowledge or preventive insecurity, both on the part of the practitioners and of the enjoyers, than because of a real and true factual antagonism, in reality, the tradition is recreated at each moment because tradition runs through history endlessly, as an accumulation or knowledge and even of necessary precepts that impregnate the entire act of print-making, as well as the foundation for all discourse that supports the language of Prints, in all the essence of expressive processes and systems. Our artistic testimony is true, but theoretically quite delicate because it is base don the last forty years we have been experiencing this perennial mutation of the mediums of print-making.

lt endures in spite of the infinite appearances with which it happens.

It ls incredible to verify that in the schools, from print-making centers specialized in research or in the universities (where advanced studies take place) such, for example, Masashino Art University in Tokyo, Japan, the print-making course lasts four years and an additional two until post-graduation. The teaching of drawing lasts only one year and other techniques take up the remaining years.

Experimental possibilities such as photography and all the electronic, cybernetic trends as well as virtual, tri-dimensional or otherwise as they apply to print-making are studied as a parallel sequence, legitimate expansions of the graphic work. Nowadays infinite possibilities of the graphic field are already accessible in school because of the diversity available through multimedia.

The "work" of the future that subverts all mediums of artistic expression is, was and shall always be present as a practical option in the graphic arts. it should be noted here that, historically, print-making has never been a frivolous or superficial activity because it is qualitatively impossible to practice any of its special manifestations without a strong technical foundation or background. Nor can it exist without a strong creative component that permeates and guarantees the creation of the image that characterizes it.

Therefore, it is that Print-making of the past that always renews itself like a force in expansion.

The Print has not moved in a straight line, but in all directions, fully at ease in conquering the territory of multi-media, where it can be exercised with great passion, with no loss as to its legitimacy, continuing to be characterized by the highly relined gesturality and contents of its particular and personal repertory of ideas. Naturally, all this is supported by an intelligent imagination in which technical knowledge coordinates a creative exercise and the meaning that grows out of it.

Print-making has absorbed the rise of new media and the constant transformation of the world that surrounds us and above all has thematized the dissemination or the great discoveries whether scientific or technological. The print-makers have placed themselves in the position of veritable reviewers and narrators of conceptual transformations. At their root. The infiltration of new meanings inside and outside institutions, new humanistic postures, human and artistic crises, the omnipresence of non-art and art (for what has ceased to be painting, for what has ceased to be sculpture), the profound human need for expression, resulted in Contemporary Engraving. The tate of Print-making is to articulate impulses towards transcendence. True print-makers (one need only do a statistical search through the Triennials of the last nine years) led us to the most varied accomplishments and valuable poetic messages.

Within the theme of “The Quest for Identity of Printed Image within its Boundaries" it would appear to me to be a matter of some urgency lo interrupt the criticisms that have been made of new techniques and new trends as being no longer print-making. All of this leads us to conclude that the printed image transcends its own materiality; it is, first and foremost, an idea; autonomous visual cosmology that can exist independently of conditioned, outdated forms, extrapolating their limitations, making and re-making themselves at every step in renewed bodies of poetic messages through pure attunement with the contemporary pulse.

Not by chance but intentionally, here in the city of Kafka we use one of his parables as the basis for our analysis, our "question", our description of what Prints are today. They are a living presence, yet a being who possesses two adversaries, the first one pursues him from behind at his roots and the second blocks his path forward and his future, and this being fights against both. In fact, what oppresses him from behind is the same force that is projecting him forward and, similarly, the barrier ahead of him is the one that gives him strength to fight what is behind him. Print-making has always changed by prevailing over all of its conceptual and/or technical adversaries through the force of its cannibalistic nature which adds and makes use of all the available means of expression that would guarantee its essential nature. The essential print would be one whose osmotic mental and manual process possesses the ability to adapt and guarantee its survival and infinite reproduction (or multiplication) through "copies" or by those who enjoy them.

We therefore believe in a philosophy of print-making and that this philosophy is what renders any of its procedures legitimate.

Thus, the art of print-making is always "in progress" and in process, whether through computer technology, projection, installations or mixed media; unlimited by technology or materials. It may be defined and developed beyond its means of transmission as a position, an idea, a search, a trend that is not retained in expressive circumstances but which precedes its material realization.

Working in progress, it is previous as the generating impulse of visuality by a permanent expressiveness. The print may he defined as a free thought not through its materially, but because of its residual memory.

We might also extend what schools do, when they objectively propose the ideal of a new "teaching of print-making" to stimulate and develop graphic thinking beyond the mechanics of graphics, developing attitudes that already exist, seeing as how it is they who endure and the times. The act of engraving lost in the sum of recipes and experiments that are only materialized in a work are not print-making proper but, first and foremost, a palpable idea in transit.

Throughout the ages, the Print exists has always existed as an idea; it does not need so-called materiality in order to exist, it may be applied or subjacent to any artistic idiom. This immateriality of the print has been its most Constant feature, in all the generations that practiced the graphic expression of ideas. It might even be said that its realization is secondary. Thus it was decodiied by the work of countless scholars and artists who clearly attempt to predict the future of print-making. We might raise the question of what the future philosophy of Print-making holds for it is guaranteed that print-making already supports and feeds 90% of contemporary art, it we consider the idea and process of print-making as a project by its intrinsic nature, therefore something (for a project is always a form of writing) that promotes varied readings, that rules and configures the work in its previous moment, that may even imagine itself as a drawing but is not exactly a drawing.

The logic of graphics proposes a priori insides and outsides which precede a limiting situation. For example, when the drawing "of the idea" is fed into a computer or a two-dimensional matrix or three-dimensional space, the proposition as product is exterminated.

Drawing is a "moment" of this idea, it is a first stage of the fixation, a circumstantial record the result of which is the print itself.

What, then, can we say or the Print‘s visibility on the pages of the internet (all or parts of which may be reproduced), in projections or reliefs or in installations generated by the proposition and fruition of graphic concepts. Countless artists reflect the philosophical trajectories of print-making.

Whether virtually or solidly, they propose to multiply images through linear readings or in volumes that have been re-shaped or reconstructed.

There would be no point in mentioning any names for that would be limiting.

By this token, the graphic image is accomplished by infinite variants as it reveals contemplation that are always based on an emotion substantiated by a graphic idea.

I believe that the future will bring new mediums, the quality at which shall always be determined by the philosophy of print-making.

What we mean to say is that a graphic philosophy precedes materiality, remaining and expanding. A tapestry achieved by the weaving at thousands of stitches or a send and plaster print of waves on an ocean beach are part of a universe in which the philosophy of printmaking is predominant, the source of which exists e posteriori and not a priori.

There are universal aspects of print-making that are identified with an expression of achievement, of print-making of thinking that is not material.

It might be said that conflicts between material and idea are the very essence of the Work. The trajectory or the realization is the work, the print, as a consequence. This may sound paradoxical and disturbing but it is true. In any event, to "protect" is to transpose outwards something from within ourselves, so that our very action is already a second "movement", given that the first one is inside our minds. As a result, the print refers to the visible world as perceived by the retina or through the sense of touch, but as a concept, as an Idea, it is totally concluded within our minds. This means that when we work with electronic or other types of media we "hunt" down the mental matrix, so to speak, by using the same residues of image-memory or technical memory that we have already transposed onto a third support as materiality, a materiality only for the retina that may never make it into print or disseminated except through the phenomenon of perception.

Thus, making a print is first and foremost having an idea as a graphic idea and possessing graphic values that precede its materiality.

And - who knows? - Someday we may even be able to do without materiality.


Maria Bonomi, 2001.
BONOMI, Maria. A Imaterialidade ou Materialidade
da Gravura. Praga, set. 2001.

The print-maker who, like us, processes the time and space of his graphic ideas, is privileged by the contemporary. The nature of his language has always belonged to the habit of lengthy technical investigations, the acute and disciplined observation of "related" or emergtng media generating quick responses to the constant crisscrossing of information. He s no longer an isolated being who illustrates or reproduces for a majority to inform, he is ahead of things, predicating visual behaviors through his own availability to the unexpected. It is easy to propose new forms of coexistence and familiarity to him without having to divest oneself of one's previous visceral universality. [...] The print-maker is the artist who nourishes what he wants to say fundamentally with the way of saying it.

[...] For the print-maker, any conflicting or multifaceted overview of the contemporary moment (in which mere perception renders every daily phenomenon susceptible to becoming a poetic act or an artistic product) is only a matter of choice or the desire "to be creative" in the medium of one‘s choice. As soon as the technology (or even the "academy") has been mastered, one's education is soild.

[...]

No familiarity greater than that of the print-maker to understand what Joseph Beuys called a "broad concept of art" in which both work and author are atomized and the sacredness of artistic territory is thus disassembled, from the support (which becomes infinite) to the way of showing the work, in other words, until the museological reformulation or until it is reformulated by galleries, exhibitions and so on - all this with tremendous vitality and inaugurating uses that are being totally reconditioned by the print.

It is both extremely healthy and discerning to realize that print-making deals simultaneously with opposite situations. From ex-libris to installation, print-making has been expanding its boundaries to myriad different supports. This art without a place has a place, a single artist to create everything that is distinguishable as art, his art, in order to maintain our “ground wire" (and some artists have done just that) we produce a "prescription", a printed image, a recipe for how to repeat this in another piece for another public, in another situation and in another moment, especially when we are experiencing a great mistier of artistic origins and sources. [...] We who feel ever more freely and in a more “contemporary” way, working for the here and now, this work of art that is never repeatable even when it is serial; this is a quality, for it will never be the same, it will always be similar, bringing about the media game of transferring strategies that involve everything from the creative discourse itself to the consumption of the discourse itself.

[...]

I could not change my medium even if I wanted to, nor would I consider doing so. Even after 45 uninterrupted years of practice, to abandon print-making for another form of communication sounds catastrophic to me. The saturation of limited routines, the frustration of overused technique or monotonous, converging paths - none of those have ever befallen me. Print-making is a creative process in which invention, realization and execution are continually expanding. I have never thought of recycling trends, I just follow the infinite, secret possibilities implicit at their center.

Verticalize, my friend! Try prolonging the time of the acid bath. Perhaps by drilling through the ground you will be able to extract vibrant, cyclical textures from a vein of coal running through some diagonal subterranean groove... That is engraving - to open domesticated eyes and direct them towards unlimited references to every manner of representation and inquiry. Always print-making.



Maria Bonomi, 2000.

Nothing in print-making is superfluous, nothing about it is banal. It is art destined tor the "soul's brain".

Since its beginnings, the uniqueness of the graphic idiom, the singularly expressive irreplaceable quality of its artistic universe has guaranteed its permanence and development. The expansion of its supports and instruments engendered its uninterrupted renewal as serial production and new iconography. What basically prevails is that true printmaking is not characterized merely through the existence of a matrix or an image but by the presence of a repertory of ideas.

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Maria Bonomi, 2000.
BONOMI, Maria (texto). I Bienal Argentina de Gráfica Latinoamericana.
Buenos Aires, Museo Nacional del Grabado,
26 sept. /26 nov. 2000. [Extracted from a text originally publishied in Spainish]

The ornament — a manifestation of composition as rhythm - exposes the artistic emotion in Maria Bonomi. Her research leads her to[large-scale] monumental compositions, in which the grooves are memorably used, and made perennial. For it is not the figure that matters, it is the rhythmic directions that the grooves construct. She has borrowed Livio Abramo's maxim to the effect that each line left by an instrument is a language; Maria Bonomi develops the rhythmic play of the line-groove as light, pulsating light, constructive light. Her early prints already reflect her interest in the groove and its use; in a Paris bienniel of the 1960s she insisted on exhibiting her prints on a wall, a place traditionally reserved tor paintings, therefore contradicting the common practice of table top exhibition. In questioning use, Maria Bonomi questions the measurements of engraving: nonetheless, the rhythmic geometric composition discusses scale more than it does dimension for, even in those that are printed in small formats, the composition leads this gaze outside the support.

The grooves are the invasion of matter, made palpable by the resistance that the engraver finds in and wich he overcomes. It is here that the emotion of print-making is best learned: in the grooves, Maria Bonomi declares her emotion at engraving, the matrix being the essential part of the print-maker's work. and the print itself no more than a derivate of the primitive act. The matrix can be made from wood or clay or any other material and, in turn, transferred onto the most varied supports such as paper, aluminum, polyester or concrete. To go from table to wall and from wall to concrete panel implies use, rendered concrete as a socialization of the work, dedicated lo the passerby. Like those of wood block prints, the grooves of the matrixes reproduced in concrete were made for a hotel lobby. With wooden slats and ropes, Maria Bonomi constructs the grooves of the Construção de São Paulo [Construction of Sao Paulo], a relief-print erected in one of the city's underground stations.


Leon Kossovitch e Mayra Laudanna, 2000.
KOSSOVITCH, Leon; LAUDANNA, Mayra. Gravura no Século XX.
In: Gravura. Arte Brasileira do Século XX.
São Paulo, Cosac & Naify/Itaú Cultural, 2000.