Bernard Boffi’s remarkable paintings create a link between our reality and what cannot be seen. Learn more about his work by visiting his website.
When I was a child, my belief was that objects were formed by the character and personality of my parents. A mother’s milk, saturated, curious—an infant’s vision repeating and evolving.
Culture and science are problematic as content in painting. Ideas separate us from a concrete awareness of where we are in the fabric of nature.
Spontaneous, improvisational thinking as a window to understanding and defining self is also a phenomenon of nature. Contemplating complex natural phenomena with unknown but recognizable elements requires an improvisational performance, a venue for artist and viewer.
My first son, Oliver, was four months old when he was diagnosed with a neuroblastoma, a malignant tumor attached to his adrenal gland. This changed my position in the world and gave me the opportunity to experience innocence in the presence of terror—a door opened, which led me to question how I was seeing.
Suddenly, what I could not see became the center of my attention. A classic drama played with endless variations, innocence in the mesh of nature, a delicious object. My son is now twenty-eight years old.
“Theater for a Small Audience” began with thinking about the origin of malignant cells and how they appeared to be part of a play in nature. Like Giacometti’s “Le Palais a Quatre Heures du Matin” (The Palace at 4 am), the work was constructed like a stage. A stage, like an altar, is a device for sending and receiving, a theater for a small audience—the play in your head.
Nature incorporates an improvisational morphology in the process of its own creation. It is this sense that has helped me to create a link between experience and my incomplete understanding of nature.
As in the painting “Ornis Occular” it is the relationship between light as a physical particle interacting with the structure of the brain that becomes an invisible, moving and complex phenomenon.
I try to construct works that relay the process of spontaneity inherent in the works’ intention. Between events in one’s life and the formal requirements of expression, one attempts to find what cannot be seen, or metaphorically constructed.
Hopefully this becomes an experience in which the viewer can participate.
Artist Bernard Boffi invites you to follow him on Facebook.
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