Under the Influence of Stefano Bonazzi- Jonah Sanderson

 Steffano Bonazzi is a contemporary digital artist whose work conveys his perspective of identity. Bonazzi is a self-taught web-designer from Ferrera, Italy, and combines techniques from digital photography, drawing, and photo editing to create his dreary landscapes. The artist states that he prefers using a muted, gray palette as a color that reflects tranquility and shelters his subjects from everyday nothingness. Bonazzi’s characters are exhausted with their relationships and are filled with fear having lost their ability to trust others. The artist uses his lens to capture the “nocturnal part of the human being” and his characters are stand-ins for archetypes, symbolic representations of chaos.

Bonazzi’s The Last Day on Earth series continues his stylistic choices and transformative practice. These three compositions from his series, titled The Storm II, To Live Home, and The Girl - Part I place an isolated figure in an apocalyptic landscape. The figures are consistently positioned in the center, giving an eerie symmetry to an unknown landscape. All three figures’ faces are obscured to symbolize their disconnect from their realities and as Bonazzi states, “a frantic search for another identity.” Each of the figures exist in the space as unsettling and unidentifiable, perhaps suggesting that they exist as a symbolic entity like the archetypes of the explorer, the magician, and the ruler. The characters are placed in an indeterminate space of a desert, beach, or field with muted tones that fit the gray color palette. Bonazzi’s dark compositions contrast a bright, positive perspective of art and life to leave the viewer with a newfound sense of contemplation and mindfulness to their own existence.

Bonazzi’s work stands out to me for his dark, surreal style. I appreciate his acknowledgement of symbolic meaning and the notion of an archetype as both subject and entity and would like to use this perspective in my project. His unsettling compositions confront the viewer in a way that demands an encounter with reality, whether that be positive or negative. I would like to extend his philosophies on archetypes and the comfort found in visual isolation in my own project. Ultimately, I would like to adapt my project to emulate his expression of the liminal and the unknown. Bonazzi’s work seems to act as an antithesis to the attention-grabbing content of contemporaneity in a way that returns to a time of unknown answers and endless questions.