MES PASSIONS

Music, wine and Peluzzi’s loves.

Musei Peluzzi Bonichi

20 Ago – 30 Set 2021

“Moreover, in another drawing, entitled Mes Passions, the artist makes a symbolic, interior self-portrait, where that little man with the tuba dances in a dream world, populated with objects dear to the painter such as his palette, the tailcoat with tails, the reference to music and the beloved violin. So, the artist daydreams and transforms reality into something different. There is a real metamorphosis…”
Marco Bussagli from Portrait de famille, Musée du Montparnasse, Paris
                                                                                                                                      

Eso Peluzzi, Frammenti di violino, 1978

Eso was a painter but his first great love was music. From the Portrait of my violin-maker father of 1929, to the violin shapes, a series of variations on the theme, music has always been the inspiring muse of his life, of his works and of his musician friends, composers and performers, such as David Oistrach, Isac Stern and Ezio Bosso who wrote the opera ESOCONCERTO for him.

Fascinated by the shapes of the violin, we cannot escape the sensuality and fragility that shines through in these works which recall the famous nude by Man Ray of which Eso kept a copy in his studio, as well as Morandi and Mondrian in the game of destructuring and recomposing the fragments of violin.

Telling life through sign and color; the pain of living and its sweetness, melancholy, loneliness and joy, the theater of life. From 1963, when his grandson Claudio arrived in Monchiero, painting became something new and more intimate: the seal of an exclusive relationship between grandfather and grandson of mutual seduction, so profound that it would infect both indelibly. Also in ’63 Claudio will meet Nietta, Eso’s last great love: model, very sweet companion, creator of herbariums and inspirer of pictorial compositions for which Eso chose to move to Monchiero.

 

   Eso Peluzzi , Nietta in giardino, 1954

Also in ’63, Eso purchased the oratory to make it his exhibition studio and donated the house with the arches to Claudio. It was here that Claudio Bonichi moved at a very young age with Maria Pia and decided to become a painter. It was here that he discovered the charm of the fresco, its techniques, the discreet seduction of the lands and shared the love of Eso Peluzzi, Eso for Ovid, for theater and masks and it was here that the first figures and still lifes were born that they later became representative of the New Metaphysics current of which Claudio Bonichi was one of the founders and greatest exponents in Italy and Spain.

Eso Peluzzi, Il mio oratorio, 1963

And finally the wine… that beloved Barolo produced by divine friends: Mauro Mascarello, Beppe Rinaldi, Bartolo (remember no Barrique, no Berlusconi?, Brezza….and Vietti. It was precisely in one of Luciana Vietti’s banquets that Claudio, inspired by wine, came up with the idea of ​​designer labels. It was 1969. So it was that Claudio called his friends together, involved them and that today we can admire, alongside the labels of Claudio Bonichi and Eso Peluzzi, also those by Pietro Cascella and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mino Maccari and many other great Italian and foreign artists. A new exhibition, this one on Peluzzi who, after many important solo exhibitions and excellent monographs (Giovanni Arpino, Mario De Micheli, Giorgio Carluccio, Maurizio Fagiolo Dell ‘Arco), celebrates Eso through his loves: Monchiero, music, the playfulness of life lived as the theater of life, wine, love and art which, with the complicity of Claudio, was transmitted, from generation in generation, once again, like a family vice, from Bindo Bonichi (1260 – 1337) to the present day.

Claudio Bonichi, Il gioco dell’oca, 1982