Running through My Mind

June 12, 2022

Mauro Bonaventura dialogues with glass souls as he does with a friend, a traveling companion, talking about his own emotions and the sensations that come to him. When he touches the glass, an almost visceral relationship forms, he tells stories from the present and the past that narrate the beauty and charm of the Venetian universe and the element that most represents it, the sea.

The stunning sphere, named “Running through My Mind” is the deep blue color of the sea.  The sculpture is created from a tangle of flexible colored glass threads that recall ocean waves, electrical circuits, or the branchings of nerve cells.

This colored cage contains a human figure, flexible and harmonious in its attempt to free itself from the tangle of threads. Mauro draws our attention to the interconnectedness of the world of the ocean, the human world outside, and the world inside our brain. There are the mysterious and powerful synapses in our minds, the relationships between human beings, and the electrical signals inside the ocean that connect all if its dwellers.

It almost seems that Bonaventura’s works release an opposing tension that on one hand clutches and enfolds his figures in the multicolored sphere that imprison them. Yet from above opens the door for them to another world of a distant freedom, perhaps the most important, that of the spirit and of ideas. While the human body can be trapped, the human spirit with its ideas can never be conquered.