One of the surest sources of fun in Pontiroli’s oeuvre is the massive cast of characters who make guest appearances throughout his more recent work. A depiction of Christ is usually around somewhere, typically attached to the cross of his crucifixion, but usually having a good time while flying across the sky like an airplane or chatting with a group of visitors gathered around him. The freakish mermaid from 2011’s “La nature double”—a fish head attached to human legs that’s tied to a human torso on a fish tail—can be spotted traipsing along the background of a few more recent pieces. Snowmen are common observers, and sometime actors in the various comedies of humans interwoven with creatures.
The recurring cast shows Pontiroli’s past work in conversation with his current animal-human acrobatic mood. “I’ve been painting poem-images from the beginning,” he says, “Before I started working around animals, I produced many series. One was around clouds, another around snowmen. I’ve had my Jesus period, too. Part of drew me to this craft was finding a fun idea, something interesting, and visually telling its story. These old ideas often find their way into new paintings. Older ideas build the surroundings of my paintings and make them more alive. For example, the windmill cutting a cloud into pieces, as if it were steaks making the cloud appear made of flesh, like it is living. Part of this is about mixing materials, and I thought it was interesting to give life to inanimate objects and imagine them being the opposite: Alive, made of flesh and bones.”
Poem-images are the latest manifestation of a deeply-rooted urge to create. Pontiroli says, “I’ve always enjoyed drawing, painting, creating shapes… for as long as I can remember, it’s always been part of who I am.” For much of his childhood, art was a hobby. “I wasn’t raised in art,” he says. Growing up in small, georgic villages in the south of France offered precious few opportunities to go to museums or exhibitions. That wasn’t what interest young Bruno, anyway. “As a kid, I had a real passion for dinosaurs, nature, things like that. I spent as much time as possible exploring outdoors and interacting with nature.”
I try and maintain the bizarre and the absurd, playing with the rules of nature, bullying them, distorting them and giving a new identity to things i paint.”
A move to Paris when Pontiroli was a young man changed all that. The gritty world of graff artists tagging up the sides of buildings first caught his attention before he moved on to partake of the wonders within the many museums around the City of Lights. “I wanted something different. Discovering surrealists, and their work, really was a brain wave,” he says.
Evening classes afforded him the chance to refine his childhood interest in drawing. The opportunity, there, to work from live models brought him an intense appreciation for figuration. Moving on to oils was a welcome challenge that he embraced fully. Intense hours practicing, often out of lessons from books and by copying masterpieces in museums, instilled a command of the medium self-evident in the works he produces today.
Oils also offer Pontiroli the chance to explore his drive toward precision in line and color. “I really like and admire line drawings, engravings, etchings, all that, for the ability to be precise—even if I can never be as precise as I would like, especially in my drawings,” he says. If paintings are one-half of his artistic practice, drawings
and sketches make up the other. The drawings are often loose, focused on movement and shade. They appear like questions: Sometimes hesitant, sometimes certain, but necessary to develop the open-ended statements that make up his oil paintings.