Vito Bongiorno he is the author of a charcoal painting full of ambivalent references.
The negation of color is darkness - a symptom of the abyss into which individuals have sunk, overwhelmed by a crisis of values, culture and consequently an environmental crisis that is blackening the planet - but at the same time it is light, coal contains a spark of life, an energy indispensable for triggering a process of rebirth. The artist's landscapes come to life from the underlying ashes, they rise like the phoenix from the residues of a past that has made them arid of ideas and sterile of feelings. They are transitory images, works in progress that photograph a rebirth.
A liquefied Europe, a fragmented Italy, individual regions dismembered, reflect an indigestible truth that the artist shouts out loud to a society blindfolded by sterile individualism. Barren landscapes, devoid of vegetation, blackened by smog, soaked in oil; almost spectral landscapes, desolate, abandoned by individuals too devoted to selfishness. Denied the light, the ultramarine blue that colors the body of a woman, bearer of fertility and therefore of birth, or rather of rebirth, irradiates the sterile maps of carbon to give them back life.
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Sicilian by origin and Roman by adoption, he was born in Alcamo in 1963 and moved to Rome at a very young age, where he graduated from the Liceo Artistico Statale; here he was a student of Mino della Site, an aeropainter from Lecce who was particularly esteemed by Marinetti. After attending courses in engraving, modeling and sculpture, he left the country, staying in Munich, and then moving to the “Big Apple”, where he came into contact with the artistic circles of New York in the 1980s. Having returned to Italy, with a baggage full of suggestions ready to nourish his research, Bongiorno shaped his very personal pictorial language that makes use of obsolete materials – coal, glue and ash – a formal research that can be traced back, in some ways, to the poverty experience that developed in Italy starting in 1967. The iconographic choices – the Colosseum, the she-wolf, the eagle, Italy – reveal a more or less intentional drawing from the iconic repertoire of the artists of the Roman School of Piazza del Popolo, Franco Angeli and Renato Mambor in particular. Bongiorno's research is animated by the denunciation of the "synthesis of life" – to use the artist's definition – or rather the frenzy that characterizes contemporaneity, the crisis of values and the prevalence of a futility that distracts attention from what really matters in an individual's existence.
From 1995 to 2005 he lived in Tarquinia: here he exhibited at Palazzo Bruschi (in the spaces of the former Church of San Pancrazio), the spectacular “anthropometry” executed in 2002: a painting about half a kilometer long, unique in the contemporary art scene. In the same years he confronted the theme of corporeality, starting a series of experiments conducted in the field of Body Art and Land Art, assiduous presences along the creative path of the artist. In 2012 he presented the performance “Terra mater” at the Museo Macro la Pelanda in Rome on the occasion of the “Roma Contemporary” fair and in collaboration with INSIDEART. In 2013 he participated in the Quadriennale in Rome.

In May 2014, Centrale Montemartini presented the exhibition “Superfetazioni” and participated simultaneously in the Viterbo Biennale and the Rome Triennale, presented by Achille Bonito Oliva. In 2014, the MAAM Museum in Rome presented three works by the artist and the Ministry of Education commissioned a large-scale mural to be placed at the “Paolo Baffi” school in Fiumicino. In 2015, he participated with an installation at the Cà Pesaro Museum on the occasion of the Venice Biennale, while the Pistoletto Foundation in Biella commissioned the artist to create a work that would be exhibited in the “Muro del MAAM” section curated by Giorgio De Finis. In April 2016, he presented the solo exhibition “AureAttesa” in Viterbo at the Galleria Miralli. In January 2017, he participated in the “Affordable Art Fair” in Milan.

In 2018, the Galleria Fidia in Rome hosts “Metamorfosi materiche”, and participates in the V Biennale of Viterbo. In February 2019, he exhibits “Our Planet” at the Macro Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome, and the MACA in Alcamo hosts the solo exhibition “Nostos”.