E Passacaglia
Bonifacho’s canvases are graphic renderings of symbols which are often painted in highly contrasting colours, using layers of rich, textured oil paint with a luminous surface. Bonifacho's canvases have finished, painted sides and are on stretched canvas.
PARALELLOGRAMS SERIES
1983-1996
This series serves as a meditative retreat within Bonifacho’s broader body of work – it is markedly removed from the saturated prismatic colour which customarily denotes his inclination. This has been achieved by essentially limiting his palette to golds and blacks, his compositions to minimalist geometry, leaving only his surfaces and textures as marks of painterly individuation.
It is clear that gold and metallic surfaces have their own associational value – both to the painter and the viewer. To Bonifacho, they possess the requisite neutrality to pursue forms without psychic prejudice – a quality that other painters have found in pure white or black… There is also something to be said for the sheer illusory qualities of this metallic substance – the way it implies an additional sculptural quality – as if the surfaces were freshly cast, or beads had been floated on with a welding torch. The effect sometimes suggests a dense, hard surface which has been sandblasted or burnished by a high-speed grinder… His selection of pigment has added new attributes to what might be thought a highly restrictive mode of painting, and the result has been (dare it be said?) one of astonishing and circumstantial beauty. – Ted Lindberg, 1992
Raised parallel lines mark most of the works, the lines painstakingly created by laying down and pasting specially treated sash on either canvas or wood. Light and shadow play along the raised lines and off the metallic surfaces of the paints. The geometric shapes created by the lines appear and disappear as the perspective of the viewer shifts. – Barry Link, 1997
