[...] The language of wood block printing is simpler and more severe, revealing the artists creative power directly and clearly. Above all else, it is Maria Bonomi's creative force that impresses us, her eagerness to find new accents with which to enrich wood block printing, providing it with a new interpretation of its natural and essential possibilities.

[...] Maria belongs to the strong breed of those for whom every new demand represents a new stimulus, yet another incentive to create more boldly, Maria Bonomi's graphic inventiveness derives essentially from the fact that she did not look herself up in print-makings ivory tower, choosing, instead, to maintain her acute artistic sensibility, alert and open to all things meaning fully related to man, to nature, to the beings and things of the world that surrounds us and in which we live. She transforms engraving into a multiform, flexible, varied vocabulary in order to obtain a language that expresses, through form and color, her varied and strange symbolism.

The engraved matrix is put to use in every manner of juxtaposition, inversion, connection and addition in a rich new game of formal consequences to transmit the “symbols of today“.

[...] In her work it is possible to appreciate the freedom of the artist's imagination, the way her artistic intelligence obeys each new formal demand that the work's dialectic process presents her with and how, once she has tamed inspiration in her mind and her hands, the lofty images appear...


Lívio Abramo, 1967. ABRAMO, Livio (apres.). Maria Bonomi. Xilograbados.
Asunción, Centro de Estudos Brasileiros, ago. 1967.

[...] This artist. arguably the most original and talented wood block printer of her generation, cannot be considered strictly representational or even non representational. Her prints tend to be monumental in scale, and have been compared to stage sets by no less a critic than Murilo Mendes. The line plays no preponderant role in them: Bonomi prefers the violent clash of masses, opposing rhythms, alternating curves and straight lines. The co-founder (with Livio Abramo) of Sao Paulo Estudio Gravura. Maria Bonomi taught technique there from 1960 to 1963, and has just been awarded Best National Printt-maker at the 8th Sao Paulo Bienniel Exhibition (1965).


José Roberto Teixeira Leite, 1966.
LEITE, José Roberto Teixeira.
A Gravura Brasileira Contemporânea.
Rio de Janeiro, Editora Expressão e Cultura, 1966.

Maria Bonomi's woodcuts of quite simple, "eloquent" symbolic forms constitute the Biennial's Brazilian revelation. The young artist's tremendous technical and thematic progresses justify beyond any doubt the National Prize that has been awarded her.


Pierre Restany, 1965.
RESTANY, Pierre. “L’Ottava Biennale di San Paolo”.
Domus, Milano, 432:49 nov. 1965.

[...]

As we know. Brazilian engraving has currently reached a very high standard. This time around. the Large group of Brazilian print-makers is represented by a single artist Maria Bonomi. Avoiding a tradition that gives preference is the line (one might even say to the melodic ltine, or counterpoint), the artist organizes her wood out prints with violent almost savage rhythms, aiming for what seems to me to be a coarse, dry tone, a frontal opposition to straight lines and curves. One might say she is interested in obtaining solemn effects; she certainly achieves monumentality at times, and I would baptize some of these pieces as "prints for stage sets".


Murilo Mendes, 1964.
MENDES, Murilo (apres.). XXXII Esposizione
Biennale Internazionale d’Arte, Venezia, 20 giu./18 oct. 1964.