For the last several years Bratsa Bonifacho’s paintings have contained obscure letters and symbols in unreadable compositions. In his latest body of work, In Nucleo, deliberate verbiage has been placed among the letters. Partial sentences and propaganda- like statements cause us to read the text, whereas in previous works letters acted as visual symbols and rarely created any concrete words. Bonifacho’s newest pieces are just as visually compelling, with highly patterned compositions filling every corner of the canvas. The fonts, lines and letters have the pace of media stimulus and the rapid waves of input that fill our periphery in the information age.

The Vancouver-based painter visually balances the information by carefully crafting much of the text into smaller graphics, which from a distance, reads like a background for the bold foreground characters. Bonifacho builds his paintings with layers of colour that illuminate the undulating stencil-like lettering. Words like “Just Art” or “Themes” grab our attention, luring us to read the plethora of other statements that make up the dense backdrop. Smaller-painted expressions like “Genealogy of the Paintings”, “Enjoy Time of Aquarius” and “Please Without Rage” entice us to formulate meaning from the stream-of-consciousness-like thoughts.

Much of Bonifacho’s text is not straightforward, with information that is somewhat difficult to decipher. Some of it reads like a moving billboard where we might just catch a glimpse of a phrase or fragment of a word. Alluding to many things of human interest (like sex, politics and art) without actually clearly communicating them, the text seems both tantalizing and sarcastic. A phrase in tiny print, “It is Social Experiment”, perhaps best describes the true intention of these cleverly constructed artworks.

Allyn Cantor