Alfio Bonanno: Art should be able to surprise

Nature has always been an integral part of the artist Alfio Bonanno’s work. From his early days in Rome, where he painted, for example, aggressive birds: were they dissatisfied with the way their habitats were being treated?

For the Italian-born artist, who moved to his wife Lone’s homeland of Denmark in the early 1970s, the transition from Rome’s bustling, noisy, densely populated city centre to, initially, Lolland’s flat landscape with its natural surroundings and unobstructed views, was a veritable artistic revolution.

Suddenly, he could physically go out into nature – and, not least, make use of nature – whilst painting, which, regardless of its other qualities, is of course an illusion, no longer captured what he was seeking.

“First I had to get over the shock,” recalls Alfio Bonanno, “but then I began to collaborate with nature… a direct, physical collaboration.”

Sketches, ideas and experiments now filled his working life. As when, as a member of the Fyens Sculptors’ Workshops at Hollufgård, he chose quite specifically to draw attention to the presence of nature.

Bags of soil

“I placed Plexiglas panels around the sculpture park, framing what we take for granted: grass, water, soil, air”.

He was so fascinated by nature’s materials that, during the Aarhus Festival in 1982, he exhibited bags containing soil samples from various locations. Red soil, yellowish, brown, black – hung on the gallery walls with precise details of place and time.

The exhibition was not a great success. Alfio Bonanno recounts with a laugh that it was seen by 30 people following a review in the newspaper, in which the critic wrote that it was probably best suited to a funeral parlour. On Langeland, there was more attention paid to the soil samples, so Alfio Bonanno was caricatured in a sketch in which bags of soil were being sold.

As an artist, Alfio Bonanno has no objection to criticism. Better disagreement than no reaction at all.
 

Boulders and wood

His experiments with natural materials continued and became more distinctive. Gradually, he moved towards the style we now associate with Alfio Bonanno’s work, featuring large stones and rough-hewn tree trunks.

Among his notes and archive photographs is, for example, a sculpture created for Hollufgård. Here, four bound-together logs support large, almost floating boulders. Incidentally, this was a work that was sold. This is otherwise unheard of for Land Art or site-specific nature art, as Alfio Bonanno defines his genre.

Part of the definition is precisely that the work is created for a specific site using materials found there. But it was Odense Municipality that was the buyer, so the sculpture could remain in place.

The works Alfio Bonanno has created on Langeland share recognisable features. They possess a certain scale and volume.

The Artistic Elite

In site-specific nature art, Alfio Bonanno is not just interested in the largest and tallest. Even the very smallest, almost overlooked details can be just as fully embraced by his artistic sensibility.

It is this sensibility that has helped select the artists for TICKON Park and which means that the park’s artists belong to the world’s absolute artistic elite.

The story of the sculpture park actually began as the idea for a sculpture trail.

A sculpture trail was intended to encourage the public to appreciate nature through art. The question was where the trail should run and how it should function artistically.

The idea evolved into a desire for a sculpture park and, in connection with the park, a nature art museum as well.

After much wrangling between the three Langeland municipalities of the time and Alfio Bonanno, Count Preben Ahlefeldt-Laurvig of Tranekær Castle offered to allow the sculptures to be created amongst the old botanical trees in the castle grounds. And so it came to pass.

Or rather, it didn’t quite. For when Alfio Bonanno describes the greatest disappointment regarding his life’s work, it is that a nature art museum has not (yet) been established, even though several German architects have put forward proposals for how it could be built so that it would itself become a piece of Land Art.

He is certain that the investment in a nature art museum would pay for itself a thousand times over.

American versus European

It took a great deal of thought to go from having a park of just under 35 hectares at its disposal to TICKON becoming a reality in 1993. Among other things, this involved finding suitable artists quickly.

He recalls a symposium at which an American Land Art artist put forward his idea of altering the Grand Canyon… A completely different way of thinking from, for example, TICKON’s very first artist, the Englishman David Nash, who, together with the park’s sheep herders, created ‘Sheep Spaces’.
The work consists of large oak trunks, which were slowly stained black by the lanolin in the wool as the sheep rubbed against them, and to which, over time, fluttering tufts of light-coloured wool were also added. 

The necessary positive

“For the TICKON project, it was absolutely crucial that an internationally renowned artist agreed to come. It was a matter of not compromising – it simply had to be the best of the best,” says Alfio Bonanno, who, with great powers of persuasion, managed to get David Nash interested in a brand-new Land Art park on Langeland in little Denmark.

“Why invite me?” Nash asked at first – and “why should I come to Langeland?”

“I had to convince him that it was necessary… necessary for something positive to happen on Langeland too, rather than the negative trend of everything being centralised and shut down: the hospital, the magistrates’ court, the post office, the police station. If we were still to be able to thrive here on the island, a swift counter-move was simply essential!”

After that, it was easy to get other internationally renowned artists on board with the idea once they heard that David Nash was involved. Even though the fee of 15,000 kroner per artist was nowhere near the fees these artists usually receive for projects around the world.

“The next artist was Andy Goldsworthy, whom I’d seen experimenting with rolling a large snowball filled with natural materials. As the snowball melted, the natural elements were revealed.”

The magic of the element of surprise

For Alfio Bonanno, Land Art, or nature art, is very much about the element of surprise, and if he were to name his absolute favourite piece from TICKON Park, it would be a choice that might in itself come as a surprise: Norwegian artist Helge Røed’s ‘Wood and Water – a Space Exploration’, which was installed in 1993 and, by agreement with the artist, removed the following year.

“Helge Røed was truly an artist who sparked debate,” says Alfio Bonanno.

The work consisted of yellow plastic tubes suspended in a group of trees along the castle lake. To ensure the tubes were exactly the same dandelion-yellow colour as the park, they were sourced from Norway. They were then hung up so that, when viewed from a specific vantage point, the whole formation formed a perfect oval.

“What on earth are those pipes doing there?” was the question posed by visitors to the park, and throughout that year Alfio Bonanno defended the installation and explained the magic it created. And the courage it took to dare to do something different.