Origins Are Hidden
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.
CLOUD SERIES
2019-2020
Bratsa Bonifacho’s extraordinary Cloud series from 2019 concerns as its theme the dismantling of matter into its components – molecules breaking down into atoms, then into protons, neurons and electrons. The most dramatic manifestation of this process is a nuclear explosion, something that fascinates Bonifacho and which he described in an interview as “bursting, destroying everything with horrendous speed and sharpness.” Such an explosion creates clouds of fiery particles – transforming everything in its path into energy. In the moment of destruction, what existed before becomes irretrievable. Atmospheric nuclear explosions rise up into the familiar mushroom clouds, an image of awe and dread – the threat that casts a shadow over our world.
“Clouds” can also be created by energy naturally generated from the forces of water, earth and sky – a hurricane, a volcano, a burst water main, a fire tornado or any kind of natural process that causes a change in state and transforms matter into energy. An emotion can also be the internal explosion on which Bonifacho bases a work. Anger, for instance, can goad him into creating a powerful painting. And an idea can be the detonation that transforms the world.
In the Cloud series, in the fractured aftermath of the detonation of an atom, a natural force or an idea, Bonifacho found the freedom to create new ideas and associations for his forms. Consider the ultimate explosion – the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe, in which everything drew together into one tiny, impossibly dense point, smaller than the nucleus of an atom. Then came the unimaginably powerful explosion that created the world we inhabit of matter, space and time. In the Cloud series, Bonifacho expresses the concept that through the power of detonation, the raw force of the universe is manifest.
– Rosalin Te Omra, 2021
