Oblivion and barbarism by François R. Cambuzat

Mater, a recently pregnant human sister, waiting for a monstruous birth. Some unsuccessful travels, some blood on her belly. It's also a claustrophobic language with no issue against oblivion and barbarism, once and for all. The drawings made by Paolo Bonfiglio and his works in general, full of distress, ruins and waste, of dead dogs and alcoholics in despair, recall the disaster and distruction not only of an untold or unhappened conflict, but also of the contemporary life. They are often indictments against all the neo-liberalist gouvernments which wish today a furious, persistent, almost dull hatred towards every social compromise. "Life belongs to the people". So Mater will suffer the consequences, she won't go away, she won't kill her newborn baby. Who's the culprit? The prick which has pieced her, her own indolence for not moving her big arse, her Judean-Christian hang-ups or the world out of this Piedmontese room? The choice of the colours shows also Bonfiglio's awareness toward these social matters: "The more you look at my drawings, the more you discover about the colours. At the glance, my paintings look washed out or worn-out but, if you look at then carefully, you realize that i work with the colour which gives material." The spirit inside the material is also important. The digital technology, for exemple, is the result of a different starting material which has been variously modified, thanks to a certain human skill. Bonfiglio's digital experiences are the final stage of an other material which will be inevitably abandoned. All things considered, Bonfiglio thinks that it's necessary to reconsider the contemporary human identity, so he questions mercilessly and shamelessly his philosophers, his intellectuals, his artists and his politicians.

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On Paolo Bonfiglio's cinema

from The horror and the enchantement by Giuseppe Spina

...It's very hard to put the works by Paolo Bonfiglio within the limits of the animation film. As a matter of fact, the unique of his cinema and his artistic act was born outside the animation and it increases onr more step the borders and the relation with the visual arts. This is the first strong point of films like "MATER" and "mortale". Completely out of the Asifa's rules, Bonfiglio puts all his learning of really good artist in drawing, painting, comics, scenography and live music video making (made in collaboration with Mick Harris, who has created all the sound tracks for the seven chapters which compose this series). Bonfiglio is an attentive observer and re-inventor of the space where he lives and of the "souls" which have marked his life experience. The artist gets the subjects, the landscapes and the visual fragments for the "mono-stories", which populate his films, exactly from the Langhe hills, where he has grown, and from the shadows of life which struck him all over Europe, where Bonfiglio develops his artistic training. Then he uses everything in a extremely "distopian" idea of the world. His topics deal with life like cross-road of death, his characters are lost in a social and spatial chaos who we can look only what remains of. In one sense it's the imaginative remains of the last decades. The result of a ruinous twentieth century based on totalitarianisms and wars which probably makes the society of tomorrow hopeless (and the collaboration with Mick Harris, one of the most important European musician of the second half of the past century, is not by chance). The cutting time are especially too long for the language of the animated cinema and too short for the figurative art. Eventually, we get to the second innovation of the Bonfiglio's work: what is intentionally outside the rules of the artistic perception it's simply a revelation of the human nature, too big to be realized and too small to be saved from the abyss. The projection and the exhibition of the drawings taken from the film are in one sense the translation and the union of this two long roads. The "arts" of Bonfiglio blend inevitably in a direction of moving images. His subtle and innovating act probably extends the conception of the cinema in a sphere of the visual art still to be written and to besearched.