(Click to Enlarge)
Acrylic on Canvas
30 x 24 inches
Signed F. D’onofrio lower left
En verso signed 30 inche Fernand d’Onfrio France Octobre 2002 with business card
White on upper and lower edges
Fernand d’Onofrio was born in 1963 in a small village in Alsace in France. The French- Italian-born artist began his career in 1981 and is represented in museums and galleries around the world. d’Onofrio was also responsible for the artwork for Annecy’s 2018 Olympic bid.
Complements of the artist’s website (www.donof.com):
Unique and unconventional, Fernand D’Onofrio is not one for exploiting a lucrative vein. Those who have tried to describe his work have come empty-handed. And for a very good reason!
During the 80’s, the artist came into painting through the door of surrealism, as if he were the holder of a fragment of Dali’s DNA. He then goes on to a world of
hyper realistic abstraction, home to a bewildering colony of planks and twisted or knotted cloth. He clearly had found his style! But disregarding convention, Fernand D’Onofrio spreads confusion by inviting us to follow him into a new cubist universe of blue monoliths inhabited by secretive escapees from anatomical charts.
Just as we are pondering this new path, he is already creating flayed-alive androids camped in lascivious poses or bent in painful confrontations. Those tortured bodies will turn into athletes beaming with determination and raw strength, whom no one seems to be able to stop. Then, they will intermingle in carnal and sensual struggles from which spring bull-like busts or eager lovers.
Ever in his creative effervescence, the artist will give birth to body parts bordering on physiological functions and the industrial world, perhaps in tribute to the infernal boiler, which witnessed his first creations. He will stay on this path with combustions of intertwined bodies bathed in bloody confusion. His feminine nudes period seems like a pause in this frantic exploration of the human being. However, there are warning signs in the painstaking way he treats the surface of the bodies: a new fascination for skin and cloth, which will evolve into strange swaddled forms. Through the dermis, the artist then dives right into cells, with textures whose layout seems determined by the instinctive laws of life.
Today, Fernand D’Onofrio is on first-name terms with blazing molecules of human size, floating in the foreground of a universe apt to engulf us.
Christophe Weber