Salisbury Crags
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.
LANDSCAPES SERIES
1977-2001
Bratsa Bonifacho is painting a landscape of destruction where chemicals and pollution turn the earth red with self-combustion. His is an apocalyptic vision that is rendered through subtleties of colour and the harshness of opposites. Contrary to the coolness so often experienced in Toronto art, these paintings are a fusion of formalist abstraction with a sensualist’s approach to colour.
Currently living in Vancouver, it has been 10 years [in 1990] since Bonifacho last exhibited in Toronto. The fact that he is living on the west coast is certainly not evident in these works, for there is none of the sombre tones as seen in Gordon Smith or Jack Shadbolt. He is reacting to a landscape that is phenomenological as opposed to the physical landscape which pervades the work of so many artists in Vancouver.
Rather than the dark oppressive grey that engulfs the city, these canvases are filled with bright crimson reds and vivid greens. This adherence to a more intense palette may, in a sense, have more to do with his roots in Yugoslavia than present circumstance. Not that I wish to present a case for the artist as “the wistful romantic spirit”, but his infusion of pure light into his colours is more synonymous with a way of seeing that exists further south.
Scratching into the surface and pulling the plane forward by layering colour on with a knife, the artist constructs his surfaces on the principles of abstraction. Sharply contrasting opposites of red and green or yellow and blue heighten the drama…
Those [works] which abandon the link to visual representations are most successful in that they rely exclusively on colour and light. This is where Bonifacho is at his best, where our seduction is so visceral that colour becomes the only metaphor for the fact that our world is coming closer to disaster.
-Linda Genereux, 1990
