My Artistic Journey

Every artist has a story. Mine has never followed a straight line. It has been a journey of exploration, change, encounters, exhibitions, recognition and constant evolution. This page tells the story of the path that has led me from my earliest views to the painting I create today.

With Maestro Ugo Boscaino, on the occasion of an exhibition in which we both participated.

The Beginnings

I began painting in 2005 as a self-taught artist, driven by the desire to transform into painting the places, atmospheres and stories that surrounded me. My earliest works grew out of direct observation of reality: landscapes, urban views and historical subjects, approached through a figurative language and with particular attention to light and atmosphere.

These works were still far removed from the painting I create today, yet it is precisely in them that I recognise the roots of my artistic research: the connection with places, memory, and the desire to transform what I see through painting.

Joining the Scuderia Radini Tedeschi

Rome, from 2010

In November 2010, Gildo De Bonis joined the Scuderia Radini Tedeschi within the Associazione Culturale Rosa dei Venti, entering into an exclusive relationship of artistic promotion and management.

The agreement entrusted the Scuderia with a wide-ranging role in representation and promotion: relations with galleries and auction houses, placement of works within the art market, participation in exhibitions and competitions, promotion through the press, television and online media, as well as communication, marketing and relations with potential sponsors.

The exclusive nature of the agreement created a particularly close relationship: proposals and initiatives concerning the artist's activity were shared with the Scuderia, while the artist retained the freedom to participate independently in other exhibitions, subject to authorisation.

The relationship, initially formalised for one year and subsequently continued, accompanied one of the most intense periods of De Bonis's artistic activity in Rome, marked by a growing presence in exhibitions, galleries, auction circuits, the press and television.

Via Giulia

2012 · Oil on canvas · 50 × 70 cm
Private collection

Via Giulia was painted in 2012, during a particularly intense period of my artistic activity in Rome. The painting retains its connection with figurative painting and the observation of real places, yet it already belongs to a moment in which my artistic research was beginning to move towards new directions.

It is one of the works I consider most significant from those years.

Exhibitions That Shaped My Artistic Growth

These experiences accompanied the evolution of my artistic research through an ongoing dialogue with the public, critics and collectors.

The Turning Point: Body and Matter

From figure to matter, the body gradually becomes part of the painting itself.

After an initial phase rooted in figurative painting and places, my research gradually shifted towards the human figure and the body. For several years, eroticism became a field of experimentation through which I explored desire, relationships and interiority.

At first, the body was still the protagonist of recognisable scenes and settings; over time, however, representation began to lose its boundaries. Colour, drips, marks and matter increasingly entered the image, eventually overlapping the figures and, in some cases, almost concealing them.

It was a decisive transition: from the representation of the body to the body traversed by painting, a period of research that gradually led me away from traditional figuration and opened the way to a freer, more personal language.

Bordello a carnevale

2012 · oil and mixed media on canvas · 40 × 60 cm

In works such as Bordello a carnevale, the figure remains recognisable, yet it begins to be traversed and almost absorbed by colour, marks and matter. It is the moment when figuration and abstraction begin to coexist within the same pictorial space.

Towards a Personal Language

The years devoted to the figure, the body and experimentation with matter represented a decisive phase in my artistic research. Encounters with artists, critics and the public allowed me to look at my own work through different eyes, but above all they pushed me to search for an increasingly personal form of painting.

Gradually, I felt the need to move beyond that phase. The figure began to lose the central role it had held in previous years, while places, architecture and memory — which had characterised my earliest works — began to emerge once again. This time, however, with a completely different perspective.

A New Direction

From the figure to places, without turning back.

Over time, my interest gradually shifted back towards architecture and the urban landscape. This was not, however, a return to the painting of my beginnings. Everything I had explored in the previous years — the body, matter, colour, the layering of marks and compositional freedom — had by then become part of my way of painting.

Real places thus began to transform. Monuments, squares and architecture retained their identity, but the space around them gradually ceased to obey reality. Perspectives became freer, buildings began to lean, colour created atmospheres and the landscape became memory and imagination as well.

It is from this evolution, matured over time, that the pictorial language I now feel most deeply my own was born.

Leggimi di te

Oil on canvas · 40 × 80 cm · 2018

With Leggimi di te, the real place returns to the centre of my painting, but with a different meaning from that of my beginnings. The Fontana dei Libri in Via degli Staderari in Rome retains its identity, while around it an entirely reinvented landscape takes shape. Reality, memory and imagination thus begin to coexist within the same pictorial space. It is one of the turning points that anticipate the language of my later work.

The Journey Takes Shape

Personal research meets the public, critics and collectors.

In the years that followed, my artistic journey developed alongside my search for an increasingly personal language. Exhibitions, encounters with artists and critics, publications and opportunities to engage with the public accompanied this evolution, allowing me to look at my own work through different eyes.

My works began to enter private collections in Italy and abroad, while exhibition experiences and encounters with figures from the art world represented important moments of growth and awareness.

I have never followed a path planned in advance. Every experience has left something behind, but the direction of my painting has always remained rooted above all in the need to keep experimenting and to find a balance between what I see and what I imagine.

Towards “Beyond Reality”

The place remains real. Everything around it can be transformed.

In recent years, this research has taken on an increasingly defined form. Monuments, architecture and real places have become the centre of compositions in which reality coexists with imaginary elements, altered perspectives and landscapes that no longer belong to one specific place.

The monument remains recognisable and preserves its identity; it is what happens around it that begins to change. Leaning houses, skies constructed through colour, vegetation, geometries and impossible architectures transform the pictorial space into a dimension suspended between memory and imagination.

It is from this research that “Oltre la realtà” — “Beyond Reality” was born: the language I now feel most deeply my own, starting from something that exists and leading it towards a place that exists only in painting.

From San Polo to Trieste.

Two new works on the way...

Today

More than twenty years after my first paintings, I still consider painting an open-ended exploration. Every new work begins with an encounter with a real place, but what happens on the canvas always belongs more to memory, imagination and the freedom to transform it.

I continue to begin with what I know — a monument, a square, a piece of architecture — and through painting I search for something that does not yet exist.

“Beyond Reality” is not a destination for me, but the direction of an ongoing search.