It can be said that in Brazil’s history of art, few artists were as deeply involved in plastic arts research as Bonadei. He conducted research on materials, ways of artistic expression and the main trends that marked the esthetics of his time, and reflected on his own work. His search for innovation was constant.

In the 20s, while he was studying, Aldo Bonadei was not satisfied with the classes he received from Pedro Alexandrino. While his master recommended that he concentrate on drawing, he secretly painted on improvised surfaces, using the lids of his father’s cigar box.

After traveling to Italy to study painting at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts (1929 – 1930), he joined the Santa Helena Group - in the late 30s/early 40s - together with artists, such as Rebolo Gonzales, Clóvis Graciano, Mário Zanini, Manoel Martins, Alfredo Rullo Rizzotti, Humberto Rosa and Alfredo Volpi. He, then, adhered to the ideal of “research freedom” practiced by the group, investigating Cézanne’s plastic composition, modulating shapes from color, and the distribution of colors and lines to create volume and depth. His paintings, like other artists in the group, present pale gray tones, and are sometimes performed outdoors – in suburban areas – or inside the art studio. But, as he was an anxious researcher, he feels attracted to the texture effects that mechanical sewing can create on the canvas. He observed his mother and sister’s work - who had a sewing atelier – and used a sewing machine and different kinds of threads to conduct his experiments.

In the 40s, Bonadei conducted his main esthetic investigations, defining the language research that would lead to his most important works.

On one hand, the artist is integrated with the artistic events, as he joined the fight of the new generation of artists for the consolidation of Brazil’s modern plastic art. He was seen as an artist of the Santa Helena Group and the so-called "paulista(TN) painting”. He produced suburban and urban landscapes - revealing a Sao Paulo City that transforms itself - and painted still-life, making this theme a way to reflect about painting methods. He addresses the problems of the construction of plastic space, researching color and the value of the brushstrokes. On the other hand, Bonadei was also very peculiar, researching abstraction. The symbolic expression of color, the materials research - including the quality of the materials - and the application of embroidery on canvas to create texture in the composition reveals his concerns about plastic.

Bonadei would not substitute one language for another, though. The continuous research on figuration and abstraction would appear in his works in the following decades until his death in January 1974.

It is noteworthy that his first research on abstraction - of “Musical Impressions” - took place at the same time as the flourishing of social figuration in the artistic scene. Portinari and Segal are examples that were praised by the critics of the time. It is in the “Musical Impressions” period, from 1940 to 1944 and limited to a small number of artworks, that is situated the roots of Bonadei’s abstraction. In these studies, the artist tries to transfer to the canvas, through gesture, the sensations that music produces in him. While listening to music, Bonadei produced pictorial registries on canvas or made drawings. Linear movements result in concentric, zigzag forms, and sequences of traces or points; and it is the result of a pulse that guides the artist’s hand. He said:

This musical experience is directly linked to the artist’s close contact with the doctor and collector Adolpho Jagle, and the critic and psychiatrist Osório César. Dr Jangle created the Musical Culture Group, and Mr César organized meetings with artists who drew while listening to music, transforming their draws into paintings, afterwards.

After the musical impressions, the lines and the drawings cannot remain attached to the concrete information, but become the essence in them. The space, bearing this notation, presents vibration. The artist goes beyond the resources of plastic construction provided by the traditional perspective. We can also observe effects on the palette: little color, grays and variations on this to pink, green or blue that constitute the background where the graphical notation is attached.

In a way, Bonadei resented the pressure of art critics and, although he had absorbed the key principles of abstract esthetics, he followed new ways in figurative research. We can definitely feel tension in his work.

He begins new research on plastic space based on the cubist language around 1946-47. It is from cubism that the artist reviews his knowledge about figuration. He studied theories about movements and, from this, he produced his first artworks marked by this type of reflection. Bonadei seems to catch intuitively what the historian John Golding observes as the fundamental characteristic of this esthetic movement: “The cubism creates a balance line between representation and abstraction”.

During the 50s, with the presence of the museums and biennials in Sao Paulo and the consequent consolidation of abstractionism in our artistic scene, the artist continued his abstractionist research.

However, he never considered abandoning figuration, instead, he put this research in a dialectic and constant relation with the abstractionist issue.

The artist adopted a new approach to plastic elements, questions of line, color and composition. On the abstract productions of this period, we find more freedom from the painter towards the canvas: in an evocative impulse of feelings, he was amazed by the results obtained and recorded them in his diary. From the trace gestuality, he achieved unexpected compositions. He created more geometric or gestual works; which seems to have gestuality, according to his diary, even when the line emerges in an almost rigid or constructed trace when he performs his works in a continuous, uninterrupted gesture, as in an act of expansion and boldness. There are several works that exemplify this type of procedure. The ordering of surface and development of forms from the gesture is clear. In these we observe Bonadei’s experiences, what Kandinsky called “Internal Necessity”. These necessities dictate the painting’s non-premeditated processing, the images that externalize his feelings, and his creative experience. We find in these abstract canvases incidentality created from the sensation that impels him to a certain “do”, and leads him to the "emotion abandon", and to subjective impulses.
We must note, however, that if gesture is important to Bonadei, he did not create impetuous or turbulent American gestual paintings. Characteristics such as “unlimited expansivity of the colored part", "large paintings” and “automatism”; a work performed with no previous reflection, are not present in his work.
Bonadei’s paintings frequently reveal preparatory drafts or drawings on the canvas in which he would paint. He was also inspired by objects on a table, eccentric objects that attract him by their forms - for instance roots, pieces of wood, masks, ex-vows, lead waste left over from physic’s experiments – objects that represent a “motive”, as he used to say. In rare occasions he abandoned the easel to paint, and a few times he rejected the paintbrush, and frequently, in his abstract paintings, there is a composition movement performed according to the traditional technique.

A characteristic trait in Bonadei’s personality was to not reject previous knowledge, but rather accumulate and assimilate it, exploring the lessons from each experience, recycling them, as well as trying to unite them into what he had produced previously. It is a feedback process, in which the artist recovers the concept of reality in the light of the essentiality discovered in the abstract painting research.

In terms of color, they are now more intense, exploring more vivid and pure tones. The color is functional; it helps to obtain balance in the painting, and emerges as a supplementary plastic element, reinforcing what the line determines. Only on rare occasions can we observe “autonomous chromatism”, as it occurs in informal paintings, in which the color is projected spontaneously and is the fundamental element in the plastic language of the composition.

Around 1967-68, Aldo Bonadei’s abstract painting research leaves a definite mark in the productions from this period: “hybrid compositions” emerge during this period, in which the objects and figures imbricate in the construction of the surrounding background. The painter starts from the real, from any motive (still-life, flower, row of houses, human figure) to begin his composition. However, his structuration abandons this first support, turns into a mental process and the space organizes itself spontaneously through divided planes, like a kaleidoscope, delimited by dark, thick contours, obeying only the perspective logic. This is, after all, the balance point so much pursued by the artist throughout the plastic process. This is the point where the legacy of his abstract painting experience in the last phase of his work is expressed.

In this “moment of synthesis”, after intense and long research, the artist’s artwork presents the formal perception and the mysteries of the emotion. In the dynamic relation between “reason and lyricism”, “figuration and abstraction”, lies the Bonadist specificity; in the contact with the esthetic projects main trends that marked the first half of the 20th century.

Lisbeth Rebollo Gonçalves