All his works invite us to reflect watching..
Mauro Bonaventura while he is working is a very fascinating experience: he caresses his figures of glass with fire, he makes them grow, he nourishes them with energy and then he traps them in cages made of stained threads. Sometimes he helps his figures to go out of their cages but more often he enlarge them till he creates suggestive structures that can be even one metre high. They are encircling structures that tie and clutch the bodies they contain forcing them to positions that could be called dramatic if they weren't so natural and indispensable, the inevitable consequences of a situation where you stop the instant that in the work of art becomes eternal.
They are female and male bodies, in solitude or in couples, either trapped by forces that are external to them or kept by cages that they themselves shape with their bodies. And watching them we wonder whether some sort of energy is materializing them or if they are breaking down in vibrations that aim at being reunited with the universe.
At this point we are tempted to inquire about the reasons that drive the artist to conceive and shape his obsessions. I think, however, that this could be an easy sort of voyeurism, peculiar to those researches that take up psychologists who are prisoners of their studies and of their own professions and who need to trace everything back to familiar concepts in order to be reassured.
These ways of approaching the works of art, however, deter us from art itself and from the artist who shouldn't be dissected, analysed, split up into sections. We should, on the contrary, approach him through his creations with the modesty typical of those who prepare them to receive something from works that are animated shapes, able to convey us sensations, emotions, contents just because they interact with us.
Sometimes they rid us of some bounds or, on the contrary, they draw our attention to some cages, our own cages, where we can wander astonished, we can stop and play unaware or where we can modify things actively so as to get out of the threads by which we are trapped.
I met Mauro Bonaventura just in this way, by observing his works with great interest some years ago. He was still at the beginning of his career. I followed the first stages of his art when he turned his tiny female figures into trees. Then I saw these figures free themselves from their vegetable frames, wander freely for a while, be confined in blocks of glass, emerge again,recover their human features and wrap themselves up in some fine threads again.
They were tales of transformations, magical events, playful interplays, small compositions that looked like they were made of air, almost impalpable shapes that seemed on the point of disappearing all of a sudden and that succeeded in attracting our attention even if they were really very small. I witnessed the artist's astonishment in front of his creations, his will to perfect his knowledge, his ability to introspect and his willingness to communication.
Now, some years later, I am very glad to notice how Mauro Bonaventura,
even though mindful of Venetian tradition, was able to escape from the
common rules typical of some good handicraft in order to create today
real glass sculptures that have any right to join the world of art.
A reat vitality breathes through his projects which are worked out by an idea that his instinct develops using glass, a material that he feels in all its potentialities before modelling it. Every work of Mauro Bonaventura is an exclusive piece and it contains a dream, a secret. Every work seems to spring from that inner glance with which the artist touches on his inner life. All his works invite us to reflect.
We can approach Bonaventura's works with the critical eye of those who
admire the technique, with the enthusiasm of those who recognize a new
and original idea or with suspiciousness and fear, with the distance of
those who try hard to understand at all costs and, as a consequence of
this, don't hear the signals that the work itself sends: its slight
breath that makes it alive, its low words, those silences interrupted
every now and then by a cry that reaches us muffled by the tangled
threads of the cage and that soon fades away.
If we approach Mauro Bonaventura's works in no haste, if we observe them quietly for a while trying to calm down our mind and we give up the habit of finding in them a message that must be translated into words, we can suddenly feel free from the bounds of our thoughts.
Then our hands play by themselves with one of these wonderful structures and, in the gratuitousness of this gesture, our mind, that has recovered the naturalness and the simplicity of a free approach, can catch from the emptiness of the intention new possibilities of communication. And in the end we don't know whether it is out will that changes the structures of the work and find different possible viewpoints and emotional meanings or if the work itself has enchanted us with its magical interplay entangling us in the cobweb of its sensations.
2001. Roberta Fabris.
