The Hindu Business Line : Light up your senses

For those who love to create images on canvas, but don't know how to paint, there is a much simpler way to find expression in art without touching the brush. Here, the camera becomes your brush. A small candle, a few bottles of different hues, mirrors, crystals, lights and a camera is all you need to get an exciting mosaic of colours, shades and blends whose existence you may never have suspected. And creativity lies in how you apply these implements to conjure up different images and forms.

The technique involves directing light through reflectors and refractors to project it onto a surface, and then taking a photograph of the image. It sounds simple enough, but the challenge is in being able to produce what you want. Simonetta Grandi Bufferli, whose avant-garde `paintings' will soon come to Indian galleries, is a pioneer in this kind of art.

Simonetta, who died in 2001, called the medium "introspective impressionism", where you create abstract images captured by reflections of light and photograph the image that best matches your emotions.

"This technique of using light as a paintbrush faces the limit between reality and a dream world, where form is given to the absence of form," said Simonetta once, her poetical abstraction as evident in her words as in her photo-paintings.

Simonetta's daugher, Claudia Bufferli Barbosa, says of her mother, "Her working table was very simple. She used macro lenses with her Canon AE-1. She focussed on any surface which reflected light — bottles, glasses, pieces of crystal, aluminium foil — and used lamp shades to give off light."

The result invariably was a medley of rich colours that convey a sense of escape into the surreal world... it was as though the artist wished to slip out of a troubled or dull world into the more colourful environs of her creations. One can see that Simonetta's "introspective impressionism" reflected her own emotions and perhaps the difficult and dramatic times she lived in.

Her father, Dino Grandi, was a key figure in Italian politics during the Second World War and the family's troubles were due to his staunch opposition to Mussolini and his alliance with Germany. Grandi, an Ambassador to the UK between 1932 and 1939, was in favour of Italy joining hands with Britain and France. He had to be recalled from London because Hitler was unhappy with this "unhelpful" Mussolini's man in England.

On the night of July 23-24, 1943, Grandi went into the Grand Council meeting he had called, fully armed with a cache of grenades about his person. In the meeting that went on all night, Grandi successfully persuaded members of the Council to force Mussolini to resign for mishandling War affairs. But owing to a turn of events, while Mussolini resigned, Grandi himself was sentenced to death in absentia and he fled under cover to Portugal and then Brazil, where he set up a thriving farm business.

Simonetta, a teenager during those trying years, found escape in art and poetry from the tensions of daily life. Says Claudia, "Her childhood was an extremely solitary one where friends of her own age were very few. Being an extremely sensitive child, she began to build a rich inner world of her own, filled with stories and fantasies." Her refuge was art and poetry; she published her first book of poems when she was barely10 years old.

Later in life Simonetta, in a foreword to a book featuring her photos and poems, wrote: "I realised that I could find an aspect in that art, which could offer me more challenging chances than straight photography." Dino Grandi returned to Italy in 1973 and lived on as a businessman till 1988, but he persuaded his children to go to Brazil and look after the farm business he left behind. Simonetta pursued her passion for art in Brazil and her photo-paintings have been exhibited extensively in that country as well as in Europe and the US. Now, efforts are on to bring Simonetta's paintings to galleries in India.

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