Bernard Damiano (1926-2000) Italy, France: "expressionist Nude", Gouache

Bernard Damiano (1926-2000) Italy, France: "Nu expressioniste", gouache signed lower left, dim: 50 x 70 cm Bernard Damiano, whose real name is Bernardino Bonaventura1, is an Italian painter and sculptor influenced by expressionism , born January 10, 1926 in Monterosso Grana (Piedmont), and died June 23, 2000 in Nice. Bernard Damiano only discovered his birthplace, Coni, in 1935, after nine years of family emigration with his father Pietro (1895-1964), his mother Rosa (born in 1897) and his sister Angela2, in Alsace, then in Vallauris. In 1940, at the same time as he was learning the craft of stone cutting in the Revello workshop in Coni, Bernard Damiano formed a lasting friendship through artistic and literary affinities with the future poet and linguist Sergio Arneodo: later, they would jointly focus on the cultural and spiritual enhancement of a village in Val Grana, Sancto-Lucio de Coumboscuro3. Finding a job as a stone and marble cutter in Tende (Alpes-Maritimes) in 1948 (this is where he met his wife Giselle2), then as a cabinetmaker in Nice in 1951, he successively lived in Nice, Villefranche- sur-Mer, Vallauris, then Nice again where, in a workshop located in a basement on rue Benoit Bunico4 in Old Nice, he painted while studying Renaissance painters and the Impressionists. During his first personal exhibition (Nice 1958, quickly followed by participation in salons), Bernard Damiano received the encouragement of the Nice painter Sylvain Vigny (1904-1970) with whom he remained in contact. His life in Nice was interrupted by two years in Paris (Bernard then lived in rue Saint-Vincent, in the heart of Montmartre life), coinciding with his first personal exhibition in the capital, from 1966 and 1968. He obtained French nationality in October 1974 and is therefore divided between Nice and San Remo2. It was precisely during the 1970s that Bernard Damiano's painting was said to move away from a relationship with Jean Dubuffet, Art Brut or the Cobra movement for, in "a nervous touch and a triturated paste"5 , drawing his style from the continuation of expressionism6. This proposal is however stated with reserve: like the Spaniard Eduardo Pisano, Bernard never dated his works, often taking up and even retouching the same painting over several years. It is perhaps in the use of “line-color and the blaze of living flesh on dark backgrounds”6 that a break is detectable. Bernard Damiano remains globally seen today as “a precursor and a marginal” in that with him “the sacred and the morbid merge into a sort of wild obsession”6.