Bonomi has arranged his Cultures in the Court of Palazzo Mandamentale, the entrance of which will be embellished with its own Rose Garden that unfolds along the walls of the entrance hall. They are works, part of a cycle begun in 1992, which reproduce plants and flowers built with gardening objects, saucers, vases, irrigation canes, watering cans. In this reverie what is needed for the care of plants becomes a plant itself, or something that to our mind seems to belong to the plant world.

And the general title "Culture" underlines how the ambivalence of the term is reflected (tautologically) in the work but also explains it. We are faced with the synthetic result of a "culture" understood as cultivation but also as an intellectual activity and therefore care for ideas and thought.

Even the Rose gardens (another version can be seen in the portico of the Church of Santa Marta) are Cultures and, conceptually they can be considered as the "modular" version of other works conceived as single long-stemmed roses, some of which are entitled If they are roses they will fade. A title that immediately makes us understand that these flowers being plastic, like all Cultures, will never fade and therefore they are not roses, even if they resemble us.

Perceptual-cognitive deception proves to be one of the key points of Bonomi's poetics that wants to show us the reality, which we daily claim to possess with words alone, for what it is or rather, it is not.

From an elevation of the courtyard, two colorful characters shaped by Cella, named Archetypes of discomfort and Harvey, look at these plantations. A figure with human s-proportions next to a rabbit-like figure quotes from the film of the same name, based on a 1950s comedy, which tells of the vicissitudes of the rich drinker Elwood, masterfully played by James Stewart, and of his imaginary friend "Harvey”, a large white rabbit who accompanies him in every situation but which, of course, only he can see. Psychic-existential discomfort is a bit of the theme that runs through the film, treated with a certain "light" grace despite its painful essence. But that of discomfort is also the trait-d'union that connects the artist to his works: it is not the subject but what makes them exist and imbues them as an example of an attitude in being in the answer is a human existence that is often complicated and capable of making anyone feel unfit for life.

Fabrizio Parachini