BERNARD DAMIANO (1926-2000)

The bouquet of flowers Large oil on canvas signed lower left. Dimensions : 91,5 x 73 cm Italian painter and sculptor born in Cuneo, Bernard Damiano, very influenced by expressionism. After working as a stone and marble cutter in Tende and then as a cabinetmaker in Nice in 1951, he began painting while studying the painters of the Renaissance and the Impressionists. During his first solo exhibition, he received the encouragement of Sylvain Vigny with whom he remained in contact. During the 1970s, his painting moved away from a kinship with Jean Dubuffet, Art Brut or the Cobra movement to draw his style from neo-expressionism, even though he never dated his works, often repeating and retouching the same painting over several years. It is perhaps in the use of the "line-color and the blaze of the lively flesh on dark backgrounds that a rupture is detectable. Bernard Damiano remains globally as "a precursor and a marginal" in that with him "the sacred and the morbid merge in a kind of wild obsession". He will live successively in Nice, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Vallauris and again Nice with his workshop located in a basement of the street Benoit Bunico in Old Nice.