Biography

Ornella Baratti Bon lives and works in Florence, where she was born. After graduating from the Istituto d'Arte (School of Art) and Magistero (Pedagogical College), she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. Beginning from the Sixties she has held numerous exhibitions both in Italy and abroad, and her works are present in private collections the world over. She has designed several book and record covers, practices etching and xylography, and is adept in the art of Chinese stone seals. Ornella Baratti Bon's art has undeniably Central European implications. Her most recent paintings are almost without exception domestic scenes set in interiors, and tend increasingly to narrate through figures. Critics have already remarked in the past on this air of "daily life narrative" pervading the discourse that Baratti Bon has been engaged in since the Sixties, and have pointed to a constant progressing "from the intimate to the fantastic" as the main feature of her figuration. At first sight, in fact, this seems indeed to be the dominant register in her painting. And yet, if one takes a closer and deeper look, one cannot fail to see that the source of her narrative is not after all a world of fantasy. Her art can rather be described as emblematic of the very nature of daily life, as exemplifying the absurd lurking in it, the shadows that pervade it. While some years ago her paintings were composed entirely in a light, almost gauzy tonality, resulting from an intensive use of white lead, and exhibited almost musical variations on blue and pink, and scales of chrome yellow which gradually faded into white and diluted emerald greens, the chromatic scale of her later paintings tends inexorably towards black, bitumen, shaded earth, and unfolds in spaces whose cadence becomes increasingly obsessive: rooms that open one into the other, buildings sectioned like the roofless "dollhouses" our mothers played with, stairs, landings, rooms and kitchens without any aperture, following one another in incongruous perspectives, axonometries, as it were, of intersecting and superimposed rooms. And yet there is no hyperbole in this representation of space: on the contrary, we are dealing with a manner of painting interiors in which the prevailing feature seems to be not visual deformation, but the haunting rhythm of the narrative, and an almost meticulous description of details: clothes thrown on a bed, tea cups and flowers on a table, laundry hung out to dry, some cats; and more figures still - musicians, women behind a barred window, with a cat peeping through, dancers and lovers in a kind of oneiric "house of pleasure", stories of mothers and babies, of old women, of lonely men. Narratives that display, if one may say so, a "happy desolation". Above all looms the shade: an apodeictic shade, sewn (as in Peter Pan) to the feet of musicians and women; a childish yet not joyous shade, an ominous companion, a second figure.
In her recent series, "Theatres and Circus", from 1988 up the present, Ornella Baratti Bon has resumed the narrative tone of her daily "fables" in pure, light colours, while not relinquishing her discourse on dark interiors, painting, as it were, in two voices, but always holding on to the structure of oneiric narration. The interiors of her houses where room opened endlessly upon room, interlocking like a Chinese puzzle, are now transformed into the stage of a theatre, and sometimes the curtain is lifted by chubby little angels. Life's events seem to be on display, for anyone to see; and yet some figurines of plump-cheeked women, clothed only with flimsy lace lingerie, seem to retain a certain private modesty of their own. The pictorial narration follows the myriad strands of a multitude of small biographies, each of them a story that has in a way eluded the chronological order of time. This, as we already noted, is an art with potent psychological derivations. The roots of Ornella Baratti Bon's art have always been explicit, and her paintings reveal unmistakable antecedents in certain Italian Expressionist painters (like Lorenzo Viani and Scipione). Now and then some of her works, such as Sulla soglia (On the Threshold), in which a small child tries to grab the ball on the table while two mummified grandparents look on, bring to mind some aspects of European Expressionism. And yet her most recent paintings, while they cannot be said to wholly abandon that tradition, point to different, both pictorial and literary paths. I am here referring to a certain dream-like quality, marked by a sort of visual hallucination, that seems to recall both the happy moods of a Marc Chagall and the sad ones of an Alfred Kubin. Also present are labyrinthine suggestions, inspired by a wary love for details, which inevitably bring to mind scenes described by Franz Kafka, a world where beauty was disclosed in the most hidden recesses, in a sort of trance.
All in all, if considered chronologically and in their entirety, Ornella Baratti Bon's paintings may be said to form the chapters of a long narration about life.
Marco Fagioli