Sometimes You Just Have To Hug That Walrus: The Humorously Surreal Paintings of Bruno Pontiroli Twist Our Relationship with the Animal World
Calling an artwork surreal is usually a blithe way to describe something odd, offbeat, or unfamiliar. In that way, the term has long been enshrined on the peak of a mountain called Aspiration, which most artists climb and very, very few summit. The truly surreal breathes waking life into those somnambulant notions that astound and terrify mankind. Surreal, done right, mutates the mundane rigmarole of daily life into a phantasmagoria of existence as it could be.
Bruno Pontiroli paints scenes from just such a surreal existence. The world he documents contains unspoiled countries populated by men and beasts who commune as equal creatures. These prelapsarian encounters overflow with joy. The figures’ ecstasy appears to imbue strange powers that contravene the most basic laws of Nature. Gravity? Overruled. Pain? Unheard of. Limitations? None.
“The world I build has no constraint, no logic. Everything is possible,” says Pontiroli. “My objective is to shake our imagination by developing a universe based on the absurd and the senseless.”
These surreal scenes are labeled, by the artist, as poem-images. The term conjures a sense of story, but not of the structure inherent to narrative. Beginnings and ends are concerns of another realm. Pontiroli’s poem-images only suggest, dispersing insinuation into the atmosphere.
Pontiroli says, “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.”
Still, Pontiroli employs several stable motifs that keep this diffuse world from succumbing to anarchy. A fixture of each painting is the interconnectedness of the characters. Elongated, twisting, and intertwined body parts show the material bond between these creations of flesh and bone. In “L’appel du pieds,” the human figure (a self-portrait, as they often are) is equipped with elongated calves that curl to compliment the horns on the ram. The human frolicking in the background of “La corde au cou” wildly flails arms that stretch for hundreds of feet to sympathize with the giraffe whose extended tail whips about in a curlicue above his neck, which another self-portrait of Pontiroli uses for a jump rope.
Entrails make a similar statement. A cloud in the firmament of “La main à la patte” leaks viscera that is windblown to the foreground, and clenched in the teeth of an upended bull wearing a luchador mask. The entrails, as mechanism, develop depth and bring an organic, zigzagging chaos to a scene that would otherwise be flat, full of horizontals and verticals. The ostrich neck serves basically the same function in “La cour des grands,” its head in the grip of the elephant’s proboscis with the same vigor as the entrails between the bull’s teeth.
The artist says, “Many people would like to see a message condemning man’s dominion over the animal kingdom, or even the rebellion of the latter against the rule of humanity. My work is much more simple: Have fun, live with joy. ‘La corde au cou’ is a perfect example. For me, it is about amusement and fun, including for the giraffe. Still, everyone is free to see whatever they want in my work.”
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.
The World i’ve built has no constraint, no logic. Everything is possible… my objective is to shake our imagination by developing a universe based on the absured and the senseless.”
“Drawing,” Pontiroli says, “obliges me to have a global approach to my ideas, to focus only on the main character without thinking of their surroundings or the colors or even the light.
Painting is definitely more precise and I actually very much enjoy working on the colors.
I guess they are very complementary in my work, I very often start with a drawing before going to painting an idea, it also helps me precise all the details of the scenery. The process lets me take a step back and figure things out. Pencil and paper helps me test the idea, refine it, to see how it doesn’t work and how it might work. The drawings basically confirm whether or not they are as interesting as I thought in the first place so I can decide if they are worth painting.”
The ideas which drawing helps develop arise from a number of sources. That inspiration is found through looking at watercolors by major naturalists, interspersed with some research on the internet. Trolling through pictures eventually reveals an animal with some physical characteristic that has a story in need of telling. The initial idea is put through the gauntlet of drawings, as described above, and through sketching directly on the canvas. Details are added layer by layer, as the oils dry and the clouds and windmills and snowmen and Christs seem wont to appear.
“I need to know where I’m going,” Pontiroli says, “even if I sometimes bring new ideas along the way that change the scope or content of my first thought. It’s unusual for me to improvise, and the rare time I’ve tried have all been, by my measure, failures.”
As animals have become the primary focus of his current series, Pontiroli has grown increasingly selective of the creatures he pursues. Each idea that evolves, first through drawings and then into a surreal painting, must balance the artist’s hope to stay true, both, to his vision and the animal he depicts.
Pontiroli says, “The animal world is really very rich and diverse. There’s so much more left for me to discover about it, and to explore. It is indeed a maturing project, and I would love to see my work in 3D. I will probably be exploring this for a while longer.*
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