Enrico Bafico Biography
He was born into a Genoese family (originally from Santa Margherita Ligure) in the tragic September of 1943 in Borgo San Dalmazzo (CN). Having obtained his classical high school diploma, in the 1960s he enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the urging of his lawyer parent but abandoned the courses to follow art lessons at the Accademia Ligustica in Genoa under the direction of Guido Zanoletti and Rocco Borella. At the same time he also deepened his studies in philosophy to graduate from the faculty of Genoa by presenting a thesis in Aesthetics. His classical training and the topics he covered will be fundamental for his artistic production. In 1968 he became interested in futurism. In 1971 he went to Carrara where he learned the rudiments of the marble sculpture technique. In 1975 he was selected for the Rome Quadrennial where one of his conceptual works entitled "Simultaneous Cryptogram" was exhibited. Still in the field of conceptual art, he then makes another foray by having a conical hole made from side to side on four stacked volumes of the history of art by GC Argan entitled "To go where we must go". This work was carried out with the contribution of the Officina Navale Zamponi of Genoa using a powerful reamer. A work that remained confused among his books for forty years and which he is now re-proposing, the title is borrowed from the well-known film “Totò Peppino and the Malafemmina”. He earns his living in the arts applied to advertising and in 1984 he creates the work "La città in Grès" for the "Società del Grés" of Bergamo, consisting of a model with an irregular polygon plan with a diameter of approximately three meters on which he builds a ideal city of medieval Italy of the Municipalities. To this end, all the materials produced by the company are used in various colors with the possibility of dismantling and reassembling them for use at the various trade fair stands in the sector. The creation was exhibited for the first time at the "Riabitat" fair in Genoa. From those years remain the bronze "Profiteroles" and "The three-faced mask of the laughing man" and the "Soffio". From 1985 onwards he dedicated himself almost exclusively to oil painting in continuous exploration of metaphysical space. The subjects of his pictorial imagination are pervaded by enormous persimmons, gentlemen at the billiards rigorously equipped with yellow gloves, more spectators than competitors, kellerines in uniform with apron and crest, gnomes, dogs, dreamlike visions of nineteenth-century Genoa, infinite ships with innumerable chimneys full of enigmas, they try to invade the surrounding space by plowing the sea on the ambiguous thread that separates what is imprinted on the canvas and the spectator. In his paintings everything is pervaded by a great silence, by a stillness that is perceived as only apparent since every detail is ready, one could almost say on the alert, to try to attenuate a possible tragic outcome that looms over the entire landscape. An aspect of bitter irony is constantly present in his painting which transforms everything into the final match of the light-hearted and compulsive player inevitably destined to lose. There is the sensation that every object could dissolve at any moment like the cloud of smoke from the last cigarette. The painting present at the Venice Biennale in 2011 entitled waiting or our billiards, chosen by his friend, philosopher and Germanist Anacleto Verrecchia, is particularly significant of his pictorial message because to escape from a culturally backward mentality in the continuous and obsessive search for “new” at any cost, Enrico proposes the port and the lantern of his beloved Genoa. It should be added that in his works there are almost always an inside and an outside to establish a boundary between the finite and the infinite, the permanence and the transitory attributable to life and death. The attention to detail is significant and emblematic of the artist's nature and demonstrates his lack of definitive "detachment" from childhood, the only period of life where every detail takes on the boundless importance of a world still virgin and yet to be explored. Even in the portraits commissioned from him, the protagonists are women and men waiting for something indefinable, still as crystals and immersed in the constant review of an intimate interior monologue. They only communicate their fragile humanity overwhelmed by the looming destiny. The dogs and the various fruits included in each painting appear to be "human" to the point of interacting with the observer, partially revitalizing the overall scenario. Even his infinite ships seem to be moving organic masses that try to break through the canvas to mess up the entire interplay of the painting. For those who are not fully familiar with Enrico Bafico's artistic career, only in one portrait have the model been assigned a body and a mind that invade the perimeter of the external game where his gaze meticulously scrutinizes both the spectator and everything beyond of the painting. This work, entitled “Mauro Giovanelli and the friendship experienced since childhood”, is important for outlining the character of the artist who, in representing the one who brings him totally back to his childhood universe, to his habitat, invites him to unconsciously abandon the his apparent cynicism.
