Enzo Brunori biography

- ENZO BRUNORI PAINTER

 

Enzo Brunori was an Italian painter, born in Perugia in 1924. It was precisely in the Umbrian cultural circles that he began, from a very young age, to take his first steps. He graduated from the Art Institute and met someone who would prove to be a key figure in his vocation for painting, Gerardo Dottori, an Italian painter of the Futurist movement, signatory of the Aeropainting manifesto. Many tried to convince him to move to Rome for a more active artistic participation, including the then minister and Roman governor Giuseppe Bottai, who was fascinated by his work during a visit to Perugia, even offering him the opportunity to continue his studies in the capital. But Brunori preferred to decline that invitation and continue his studies in his city.
It is during this period that the University for Foreigners of Perugia promotes summer courses featuring distinguished lecturers such as Ungaretti, Zevi, Argan, and Venturi, whom he follows with passion and with whom he establishes a fruitful and lasting relationship.

Only later did his master Gerardo Dottori manage to convince Brunori to move to the capital where, in 1951, he held his first exhibition organized by the Art club of Enrico Prampolini at the Galleria Il Pincio. He arrived in Rome during the crucial period of the dispute between abstract and figurative art. The path to recognition was not easy for him because these were the dark years of the post-war period, where art had no easy outlets. Thanks to his tenacity and the support of many of his friends, particularly the backing of the art critic and teacher Lionello Venturi, he managed to make his way in the study of post-cubist laws, drawing inspiration from nature and things while neglecting the interest in their faithful reproduction. He went through a period of research that his friend Venturi would later define as abstract-concrete, a research that would culminate in a well-defined idea precisely in the 27 works he exhibited in the exhibition organized at the Roman gallery Il Pincio, according to which the study of reality excludes any form of imitation. He presented works with a cubist stamp such as Fiori Secchi (1947), Albero (1949), Ritratto (1948-1951) and with a artwork that most captured the critics for the accurate study of Neoplasticism, Sedia Cappotto Cappello (1950). In the following years, he ventured into freer paintings where color determined forms and rhythm, among these Mimose and Albero di mimose (1953). Between the 1950s and the 1960s, color took over, and his coherent thought evolved towards what Crispolti calls "the poetics of color."

Equally important in those years for Enzo Brunori was the strong friendship with Enzo Rossi, an Italian painter who strongly advocated for the reasons behind Cèzanne's and cubism's experience, anchored in the observation of space as the living body of the world; the same who later initiated experimentation in the abstract field based on a sense of linear and chromatic tension.

In 1953, the Exhibition of Abstract Art was set up at the National Gallery of Modern Art where Brunori participated with his artwork Pittura (1952).
In 1955, we find him as part of the group of artists invited to exhibit their works at the "Giovani Pittori" exhibition at the Galleria Schneider in Rome: artists united by the non-figurative trend. In the various works, Mimose confirms his emancipation of chromatic values, color assumes for the painter an autonomous expressiveness, intrinsic in all its suggestive capacity of the essence of the natural datum.
1956 marks a period of changes for the painter that sees him introduced into the international art scene; in these years, he exhibits in some shows abroad and participates in the twenty-eighth Venice Biennale exhibiting three canvases, After the Rain (1955), Inner Garden (1956) and The Green Tree (1956), alongside the works of Burri and the abstractions of Dorazio.

He became a highly regarded painter for his artistic consistency, admired and discussed by artists, critics, collectors, and dealers, not only Italian. In those years, the "sea" became one of the elements of inspiration for Enzo Brunori, who was overwhelmed by new emotional transports, bringing about real stylistic changes; color took on more sensory and visceral traits in works like Waves on the Rocks, Blue Sea, and Sun on the Sea. One of his artistic inspirations was certainly Renato Birolli, an artist from the 1930s who identified with the search for a European cultural-artistic horizon and with the pursuit of an art that was not archaizing but well-rooted in the present and morally committed.
The quadrennials of 1956 and 1959 and the biennial of 1958 proclaim his artistic success, a success that, however, will soon come to a rapid halt.
The sixties indeed mark a profound change in personal research for the artist, heralding the prelude to a phase of self-exile, which he himself preferred to call a period of solitude, even going so far as to refuse participation in the Venice Biennale, openly contesting its qualitative decline. This public opposition led critics to no longer consider him at a public level.
In the years to come, he will never stop painting, presenting himself in 1961 with the two works Rinasce il Giorno and Il Grande Specchio, capable of defining the full individuality of the artist. However, he remains distant from public exhibitions, except for rare exceptions that he chooses with meticulous accuracy.
He will say in an interview that painting is not meant to express judgments but to demonstrate quality, which requires a lot of reflection and ways and times of work that, for him, contrast with the rules that art played in that period.

From 1965, he became a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in L'Aquila and during the same period directed the art institutes of Cortina and Civitavecchia; in 1977, he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. His productions from the seventies and eighties, including Lo Sciamano blu (1976), Acquaforte (1979), and Gabbiani (1983) highlight the existential state of Brunori and the search for real elements in the use of colors.
In 1988, the city of Perugia dedicated an anthology to him for his artistic movement, a retrospective that was later repeated in Faenza.
In 1992, we see him participate in the exhibition in honor of his friend Lionello Venturi "From Cézanne to Abstract Art," first set up in Verona and then in Rome.

In 1993, Enzo Brunori died due to an illness, and in the same year, the cultural association "Enzo Brunori" was established, desired and promoted in his honor by his life partner Vittoria Lippi, which collects all the works and the archive of the Perugian painter, remembered as the Shaman of Color.