Oscar Bony
Posadas, Misiones, Argentina, 1941 - 2002
Oscar Bony's artistic career is characterized by an incessant desire for discomfort, to explore areas that the sexual, political, and aesthetic morality of his time prefers to cover with a decorous silence. From his phallic objects and monstrous installations of his first appearances in the Buenos Aires art scene to his mythical installation, La Familia Obrera, at the Di Tella Institute in 1968, an ethic of transgression germinates and forever affects his work. The propensity to cross borders survives beyond the different media with which he experimented: sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. His incursions into the national rock scene (he designed album covers, posters, and magazines that consummated the visual style of an era) multiplied the ways of approaching the core of his interests: the enchanting power of the image, its suggestive force.
This ethic also has its effects on the construction of his figuration as an artist. Halfway between marginal sniper and melancholic nomad, Bony never conformed to the imperatives of the professional artist; he dodged the demand to build an artistic career, he made the edges his natural habitat. His series of shot self-portraits works in this sense. It is a matter of "killing" the artist, to accomplish a real action on the visual surface but also to burst the political violence of Argentine history on the bulletproof glass. Since then, death appears to be projected in his work from the 1990s. Corpses, tombs, skulls, and mortuary allegories become recurrent, until his last exhibition, dedicated to the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001.
In parallel to this critique of the morbid art system, its agents, and values, Bony will rescue the world of his teenage years. After a long stay in Italy, he dedicates a good part of his production to autobiographical imagery. Recovering objects and images from his youth in Misiones, his first pictorial pieces, and a reliquary of his life in Posadas (easels, a piece of reddish earth, a fishing rod), the artist, thus, reveals a line of work that can be traced throughout his career: the tension between community and individuality, between a present that is perceived as fallen and a past that cannot be recovered except in conditions of precariousness and fragmentation.
