A kind of contamination amongst the arts dissolving the boundaries which distinguish them

The hauntingly poetic images created by Italian artist Alessandro Bavari, with their luscious textures and exquisite detail, are the fruits of a long journey of exploration to discover a personal artistic language that can transcend the limits of established media through what he describes as "a kind of contamination amongst the arts dissolving the boundaries which distinguish them."
These images make many references back to the paintings of Italian and Flemish artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; Giotto, Piero della Fancesca and Hieronymus Bosch to name but three. Not the grandeur of the high Renaissance, but the essentially humanistic outlook of the painters who wished to convey the pathos and pleasures of our inner lives.
They are "Gothic" in feel, with their fantastical imaginings, adoration of detail and fascination with the natural world. The size of your screen will not do them justice, they should be ten feet tall so you could climb up and into them to appreciate their complexity and wealth of content. Bavari began making photomontages at the age of fifteen.
He subsequently studied scene-painting and history of art at the Academy of Fine Art in Rome. He started working in a variety of traditional media, from oil painting to copper plate engraving, whilst maintaining a strong interest in photography. His working methods became increasingly experimental, mixing tar, glue and industrial paints and exploring the possibilities of photographic printing techniques.
He then added imprints creating a vocabulary from found natural objects, such as bones and fossils and creatures washed up on the shores near his home. In 1993 he bought his first Macintosh. Working exclusively in Photoshop to create his highly personal imagery, he found he was able to arrive more easily at the fusion of painting and photography that he had been working towards. Bavari regards the computer as being like "any other working instrument, like a brush or palette or darkroom".

"Il Giardino di Jerome" (Jerome's Garden) was intended as a homage to the Dutch painter Hieronymus ( Jerome) Bosch, 14th century visionary artist and precursor of modern surrealism. This creator of apocalyptic images has inspired other works by Bavari including "Ascesa Verso il Nuovo Medioevo" (Ascent to the new Middle-Age) a piece commissioned by Adobe for their year 2000 calendar.
"Primum Mobile" (Primum Mobile) is one of two pieces shown in this gallery - the other being "Regina Degli Insetti" (Queen of the insects) - which were part of a series of images commissioned by "Direct2Brain" studios, to be used as frames inserted into a video production.
"Primum Mobile" was, in Medieval astrology, the tenth and outermost concentric sphere of the universe, thought to revolve around the earth from east to west in 24 hours causing the other nine spheres to revolve with it.
"Sirene" (Sirens) were sea nymphs in Greek mythology, believed to lure sailors to their destruction on the rocks with their exquisite singing. This piece, concieved and realized in 1997 to promote his artistic activities, was printed as a postcard and is one of his most abstract, colourful and painterly works.
"Il Riposo di Dafne e Artemide" (The repose of Daphne and Artemis) depicts these two goddesses of the hunt from Greek mythology, resting with their trophies on the ends of their sticks, among them a bird, a bug, a sheep's head and a fox. Daphne was later transformed into a laurel tree, as their bark-like headdresses suggest. Artemis is the Greek equivalent of the Roman goddess Diana. It was commissioned in 1997 as the cover for "UTBR Magazine" a review of gothic and industrial music.

Suzanne Cline
April 2000

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