Boris Dondé, the Incarnation of Painting Art

“Enough with producing masterpieces: you have to be the masterpieces!” With this statement Carmelo Bene, one of the most famous protagonists of the Italian “neo-avant-garde” theatre, revealed to his audience the essential characteristics that a contemporary artist must consciously have, but that also an artist of the classical, medieval and modern periods had to unconsciously possess.

In this era, it is not enough to know how to compose, reproduce and invent because everything has already been said, invented and produced. With the advent of digital technology, art has become weaker because it has to give way to technology that allows the production of impeccable colours, brilliance, reflections and nuances to be numerically controlled. Boris Dondé is a beyond-artist, precisely because he goes beyond the concept of conventional art. An artist whose style has become a symbol, a banner of contemporary art.

One needs to know how to be as malleable as matter, as dynamic as colour, as brilliant as jewellery to be able to keep up with this continuous evolution. Global, like his view of the world, he is a spectator who enjoys a privileged perspective. With his gaze on the changing world, with which he dialogues thanks to his mastery of the universal artistic language, the artist has been able to make the most of his studies at the New York Academy where he was able to get to know and breathe the air of the fervent circles of those years.

Art as thought, philosophy, lifestyle, elegant and dynamic but never hectic because it is well thought out and calibrated. It is not enough to produce works of art, it is necessary to be that work of art because it is the artist that the admirer wants to possess, not the simple material produced by them. This is demonstrated by the onerous and spasmodic chasing after the works of the greats of the past and having them attributed by the major art critics.

Dondé has understood all this and assimilated it so well that he himself has become the product of his art. The architect of his success, he has exhibited in Monte Carlo, Tokyo and Dubai, in elegant showrooms in St. Moritz, Vienna and Zurich and then consecrated himself in the temple of the new permanent gallery in Nassa Street in Lugano.

He is his art, and his art is the symbol of his person. It is in these symbols, in his works, that we recognise his form. It is in his art, in his way of moving, of dressing, in his elegance that we recognise his value. In ancient Greece, the symbol meant precisely this; it was the means of recognition but also of control of the person, of the family to which one belonged. It was obtained by breaking an object irregularly into two parts. Whoever owned one part could only recognise the owner of the other half by matching the two pieces.

Plato tells us of Zeus who, envious of men, divided their essence, condemning them to search forever for that half that made them perfect, complete. We, since then, are condemned to seek that half forever. In the other person to love, in their gestures, in their forms: we are forever seeking those vibrations that put us in harmony with the world. It is for this reason that Plato tells us that we are not men but we are the symbol of man, of that ancient man described in the Symposium.