Borgo Museo | Casa Paloscia 1975 – 2021
Biography
Italo Bolano is an all-round artist, draftsman, painter and ceramist, born in Portoferraio (Elba Island) in 1936, he died in his home in Prato in 2020. He was defined by the poet Mario Luzi: “Artist of our drama”, For his ability to express “an inner world contrasted as a reaction to the external world” in the words of the critic Tommaso Paloscia. He completed his artistic studies in Florence and architectural studies in Padua, later becoming a teacher of art history in the state schools of Prato and Florence. Fascinated by the East, he traveled to various parts of the world, being attracted in particular by street furniture in the art-city relationship of Jerusalem, Paris, Brussels and Barcelona. Jacopo Bonomi, president of the La Tore Literary Prize, remembers him thus: “[…] his uniqueness […] a unique artistic sensitivity. […] The only one who has the strength and perseverance […] to insist for decades that the dissemination of culture and its use are not elitist, but open to the public”.
Philosophy
His career as an artist began at the age of fourteen, when prof Alfonso Preziosi, a writer from Elba, organises his first exhibition for him. Starting from the visions of Pollock, Kline, Harting and De Kooning, he then reached his own language made up of signs similar to ideograms. His painting therefore passed from youthful figurative expressionism to abstract expressionism. In 1964, stimulated by a friend of March Chagal, Lasara Galpern and the painter Emici Schumacher, he founded his International Art Center, on the outskirts of Portoferraio, near the Napoleonic villa of San Martino, with which he contributed to the development of abstract art. opera in Tuscany, then transforming it into the Open-Air Museum, where there is a perfect organic relationship between art and nature. It is one of the first paths of modern art recognised by the Tuscany Region and consists of galleries for exhibitions, conference spaces, ceramic workshops, open-air theatre as well as the master’s summer studies. In 1970 the experience of ceramics began in Sesto Fiorentino, in the ancient Bitossi factory and later in Montelupo Fiorentino in the Marco Tombelli factory. Throughout his career Bolano expressed his poetics in architecture, painting with acrylics, inks, oils and mixed techniques, sculpture, using not only ceramics, but also glass and stainless steel, because he firmly believed that the artist to be really such, it had to express itself with any technique and material. According to Bruno Rosada, councilor of the 1993 Biennale, Bolano is: “an artist who, when the twentieth century was destructuring, grasping the shreds of things and reconstructing others in the image of the soul. According to a conception dear to Kandisky when he stated that the harmony of colours is based only on effective contact with the soul”.
Artwork in Castagno
Marina presents, like many of Bolano’s ceramics, an essential sign language to give life to the representation of a seascape of Elba with brilliant colours of cobalt blue and ultramarine, the unforgettable colours of the Elbe sea, spread out in liquid areas of color , with chromatic articulations of great vivacity, enclosed within a semicircle shape. The figures appear luminous and fluctuating with the elements of nature condensed into signs and numbers, where the natural landscape and the artificial landscape are reflected simultaneously in an evident formal synthesis. Bolano’s expressive research presents these recurring themes: its sea, its rocks, boats, ports, sails, but also seagulls and lighthouses, marine cemeteries and underwater gardens. It is therefore clear and evident the deep love for her native island lived and represented as an “island woman” and “cosmic mother” with a fluent and suggestive language. As the art critic and dear friend Tommaso Paloscia writes: “There is an accentuated division between sign and color in which Bolano separately seeks the means to communicate the astonishment that his land continues to exert on him”.
Alessandra Ribaldone Bolano, after the death of her husband, created a Foundation in her name and is currently involved in the restructuring of the Museum on the Island of Elba or the Italo Bolano Open Air Museum in San Martino (Portoferraio), where, during the summer season various events are organised.