Enzo Brunori biography
- ENZO BRUNORI PAINTER
Enzo Brunori was an Italian painter, born in Perugia in 1924. It was precisely in Umbrian cultural circles that he began to take his first steps at a very young age. He graduated from the Art Institute and met what would prove to be a key figure in his vocation to painting, Gerardo Dottori, an Italian painter of the futurist movement, signatory of the manifesto
It is in this period that the University for Foreigners of Perugia promotes summer courses in which authoritative teachers such as Ungaretti, Zevi, Argan and Venturi whom he follows with passion and with whom he establishes a profitable relationship and long-lasting.
Only later did his teacher Gerardo Dottori manage to convince Brunori to move to the capital where, in 1951, he held his first exhibition organized by the Art club by Enrico Prampolini at the Galleria Il Pincio. He arrived in Rome in the crucial period of the dispute between the abstract and the figurative. The road to success was not at all easy for him because it was the dark post-war years, where art had no easy outlets. Thanks to the tenacity and support of many of his friends, in particular the support of the art critic and teacher Lionello Venturi, he manages to make his way in the study of post-cubist laws, drawing inspiration from nature and things and instead neglecting the interest in the faithful reproduction of them. He goes through a period of research that his friend Venturi will later define as abstract-concrete, research that will end up with a well-defined idea precisely in the 27 works that he exhibits in the exhibition organized at the Roman gallery Il Pincio, according to which the study of reality excludes any form of imitation. He presents himself with cubist works such as Fiori Secchi (1947), Albero (1949), Portrait (1948-1951) and with a work that most captures the criticism for the accurate study of Neoplasticism, Chair Coat Hat (1950). In the following years he tries his hand at freer paintings where color determines shapes and rhythm, among these Mimosas and Mimosa Tree mimosas (1953). Between the '50s and the '60s it was color that took over, his coherent thought evolving towards what Crispolti calls "the poetics of colour
Equally important in those years was for Enzo Brunori the strong bond of friendship with Enzo Rossi, an Italian painter who strongly supported the reasons for the experience of Cèzanne and cubism, hinged on the observation of space as a living body of the world; the same one who had then started an experimentation in the abstract field based on a sense of linear and chromatic tension.
In 1953 the Abstract Art Exhibition was set up in the National Gallery of Modern Art in which Brunori participated with his work Pittura (1952).
In 1955 we find him part of the shortlist of artists called to exhibit their works at the "Young Painters" exhibition at the Schneider Gallery in Rome: artists united by the non-figurative tendency. In the various works, Mimosas confirms his emancipation of chromatic values, color takes on an autonomous expressiveness for the painter, intrinsic in all its suggestive capacity of the essence of natural data .
1956 marks a period of changes for the painter that also sees him introduced into the international artistic panorama; in recent years he exhibited in some exhibitions abroad and participated in the twenty-eighth Venice Biennale exhibiting three canvases, After the rain (1955), Internal Garden (1956) and The green tree (1956), alongside the works of Burri
he became a highly appreciated painter for his artistic coherence, admired and discussed by artists, critics, collectors and dealers, not only Italians. In those years the "sea" becomes one of the elements of inspiration for Enzo Brunori who is overwhelmed by new emotional transports, bringing about real stylistic changes of direction; color takes on more sensorial and visceral features in works such as Waves on the rocks, Mare blu and
The four-yearly exhibitions of 1956 and 1959 and the biennial of 1958 proclaimed his artistic success, a success which, however, soon came to a rapid halt.
The sixties in fact determined in the artist a profound change in personal research which heralded the prelude to a phase of self-exile, which the same he preferred to call it a period of solitude, going so far as to refuse participation in the Venice Biennale whose qualitative decline he openly contested. This public opposition leads critics to no longer consider him on a public level.
In the years to come he will never stop painting, he appears in 1961 with the two works Rinasce il Giorno and Il Giorno Large Mirror, capable of defining the full individuality of the artist. However, he remains distant from public exhibitions, except for rare exceptions which he chooses with great care.
He himself will say in an interview that painting is not called upon to express judgments but to demonstrate quality, which requires a lot of reflection and ways and times of work for him in contrast with the rules that art played in that period.
From 1965 he became a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in L'Aquila and in 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 of the seventies and eighties, including The Blue Shaman (1976), Etching (1979) and Gabbiani (1983) highlight the existential state of Brunori and the search for real elements in the use of colours.
In 1988 the city of Perugia dedicated an anthology to him about his artistic movement, a retrospective which was then also repeated in Faenza.
In 1992 we see him participate in the exhibition in honor of his friend Lionello Venturi "From Cézanne to Abstract Art", set up first 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, wanted and promoted in his honor by his life partner Vittoria Lippi, which collects all the works and the archive of the painter from Perugia, remembered as the Shaman of Color.
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