A Tribute to Luigi Bonotto, the Visionary Fluxus Patron Who Merged Art, Life and Industry
In the hills of Molvena, a rural corner of the Veneto, one of the region’s most notable manufacturing stories took shape, alongside an extraordinary history of collecting and enlightened patronage. Here, one man’s passion for culture evolved organically into an authentic corporate culture, as art flowed into everyday life and merged seamlessly with entrepreneurial practice. Today, Observer pays tribute to that singular story and its central protagonist, Italian textiles entrepreneur, collector, creative innovator and patron Luigi Bonotto, who passed away at the age of 84 on November 19, leaving behind a legacy that weaves together Fluxus, visual poetry and the very spirit of ‘Made in Italy.’ Note: My tribute draws from an interview recorded in 2017 for a BA thesis on exemplary cases of enlightened art patronage and corporate art in the region.
Fondazione Bonotto was established in 2013 to promote the Luigi Bonotto Collection, which, since the early 1970s, has amassed an extensive body of works, audio and video recordings, posters, books and magazines by Fluxus artists and by the international verbo-visual movements that emerged from the late 1950s onward. The result is an extraordinary collection, built over more than 40 years, comprising over 15,000 artworks and documents, many of which were donated directly by the artists themselves. It stands as a record of the dense, ongoing personal relationships Bonotto forged with these artists, whom he welcomed and supported, making art an integral part of his life and company through a continuous dialogue between the arts, business and contemporary culture.
An upbringing that shaped an entrepreneurial philosophy
Luigi Bonotto’s family company had once produced hats, but by the 1950s, hats were no longer everyday necessities, and his father encouraged him to learn something new within the textile sector. He studied at a textile school and, driven by curiosity, also attended the Venice Academy of Fine Arts.
There, he became a student of the renowned Italian postwar artist Emilio Vedova and began spending time with intellectuals and artists in an environment that shaped a more open mindset and clearly influenced the later success of his company. It fostered an entrepreneurial culture attuned to creativity, experimentation and innovation, a sort of “secret recipe” he later passed on to his children, enriched by the artists who surrounded them throughout their upbringing. This creative foundation eventually led to another innovation, or more accurately, a retro-innovation, with the “Fabbrica Lenta,” which helped the company remain competitive as the socio-economic landscape shifted.
Bonotto remained at the Valdagno school as a teacher, producing early fabric samples that he initially sold only as designs. He soon realized he could earn more by building an actual factory, combining technical expertise with the artistic influences he had absorbed and continued to cultivate. This was the ‘70s, when giants like Lanerossi and Marzotto were already in crisis. Yet Bonotto recognized that the textile downturn was an opportunity: the best artisans and master craftsmen were suddenly available, and high-quality machinery was being sold off at a discount.
While others closed, Bonotto invested—once again prompting people to call him crazy. That decision was the genesis of a company that now supplies some of the world’s leading fashion houses with high-quality textiles, and that has been partly integrated into the Zegna Group since 2016. “I knew from the start I needed to surround myself with a certain kind of people,” Bonotto said. “The best artisans, the great textile masters who had become available. Focus on quality and craft knowledge, which is already a culture in itself. Minds of making—specialists ready to engage with the artists who passed through here, in a fertile exchange that benefited both artistic research and production.”
It was this creativity—absorbed from the artists and then transmitted to his sons Giovanni and Lorenzo—that ultimately allowed the company to endure. While many Italian textile firms in the 1990s and 2000s succumbed to global competition driven by speed and cost, the Bonotto family adopted what they call the “Slow Factory” model: time-honored looms, master craftsmen and low-volume, high-value production that continues to thrive in the international luxury market. Rejecting standardization, Bonotto treated fabric as his canvas, using it for material expressions of culture, craftsmanship and artistry—his key differentiator in the global luxury sphere.
A philosophy in which art shapes industry
At a time when corporate art is increasingly common but often framed as marketing or social responsibility, Bonotto’s story was defined by a strong conceptual and physical connection between art and industry. “Luigi taught us that even a manufacturing company can become a social space where art is part of daily work rather than an ornamental status symbol,” Giovanni Bonotto told Observer after his father’s passing. “His intuition was to let a textile factory and an art foundation coexist within the same production spaces to show that Art and Life are fully integrated.” Giovanni is now carrying that legacy forward, tightly weaving the business together with art.
“Today, everyone talks about companies investing in art, but in most cases it’s just applied art,” explains Patrizio Peterlini, Fondazione Bonotto’s longtime director, noting how companies often treat the business like a patient brought to a psychoanalyst, expecting a cure. But that is not art’s role. At best, it may work for a single product line for a season, as seen in brand collaborations at fairs, but not beyond that.
For Bonotto, culture was the true engine of production. His strategy was shaped not by market trends but by a Fluxus-inspired belief that “Technique is essential, but technique without culture is empty.” Other companies often came asking about Bonotto Spa’s strategic plans, assuming the art was part of a formal investment strategy. In reality, there were no strategies at all—only a lived fusion of art and life that echoed Fluxus philosophy and organically shaped the company’s identity. “The ‘Bonotto model’ is perhaps unique, perhaps unrepeatable or anyway rare. It was born spontaneously. And for this reason, it cannot become a ‘model’ to be replicated,” Peterlini said. “It is a beautiful story of a personal passion—Luigi’s passion—that resulted in relationships and friendships that flowed naturally from his life into the life of the company, simply because he hosted the artists here.”
A living art archive in a factory
Bonotto only grasped the full scale of what he had accumulated when he moved into a new house. At that point, the need to catalogue everything became clear: to establish an archive and, from there, a foundation capable of preserving and sharing this heritage. Only afterward did he begin consciously acquiring works and books, identifying gaps he wanted to fill. This shift is what makes the collection one of the very few truly coherent and cohesive ones—an assemblage that has become a significant reference point for specific areas of art history.
Today, the collection is still housed in the 20,000 square meters of Bonotto Spa, not only in offices but also the production floors and warehouses that produce and store luxury textiles, ranging from high-end woven fabrics to artisanal, slow-production textiles used by major luxury brands.
Peterlini acknowledges that keeping artworks amid the daily rhythm of factory life carried risks, but Bonotto insisted they belonged there because the workers embodied the very value reflected in the art. If something was damaged, it simply became part of the life of a living artwork—perfectly aligned with Fluxus thinking. The works belonged in the very place where they originated, what Bonotto called the “Lourdes grotto.” They had to remain where the miracle occurred, not in a detached white cube.
“At first, the fear was on the workers’ side,” Bonotto recalled. “They thought everything would be shut down and turned into a museum, the way Bisazza turned one of its old factories into a museum. But they were reassured immediately. Eventually, the workers began stopping me in the halls, asking what this or that work was.”
This integration makes it far easier to bring clients to Molvena—despite its isolation—because the visit feels closer to a museum experience than a showroom appointment in Milan. Here, clients encounter not only the product but also the environment, process, culture and history behind it, recognizing that the company’s artistic nature is not a façade but the soul of the work. In the warehouse, a Maurizio Nannucci neon reading “Art as a social environment” neatly encapsulates what the Bonotto world has become.
The Veneto context and a shifting Italy
Local reactions to Bonotto’s initiatives have long been muted. Even when he staged a show in Bassano in 2000, the response remained muted. When we spoke, Bonotto attributed this to a deep-rooted cultural conservatism shaped by the Church and by a self-made, peasant-rooted entrepreneurial mentality that led many Veneto business owners to dismiss the role of culture in society—a tendency reinforced after fascism’s instrumental use of the arts. That mindset, he argued, ultimately constrained them and became one of the causes of the decline in Veneto’s industrial production under globalization.
“This is what hurt them, what paralyzed them. They’ve been talking about a crisis for years. What crisis?” Bonotto said. “A real crisis happened in the sixties, but Veneto kept producing. Artisans knew how to react. They had extraordinary technique but also the imagination to find solutions, to change and innovate.” Flexibility—this ongoing capacity to adapt and innovate—was, for him, the spirit of made in Italy and one of its most misunderstood strengths.
During our interview, we reflected on how cultural habits have shifted in Italy. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was natural for entrepreneurs and the upper middle class to move in cultural circles, hosting artists and exchanging ideas—a fertile milieu echoed in Ennio Brion’s accounts of Milan. By the late 1970s and especially the ‘80s, however, a new model of “predatory entrepreneurship” focused solely on profit had emerged, and culture was seen as unnecessary.
“With culture, you can’t eat, you can’t buy bread. They thought I was strange, surrounding myself with people even stranger, wasting my time on these useless things instead of focusing solely on the business and ‘making money,’” Bonotto recalled. “Yet we survived; this model is the one that proved to work, while all the others closed.”
Fondazione Bonotto’s mission
Today, the foundation promotes Fluxus and Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry through exhibitions, loans and collaborations with museums, foundations, archives, fairs and cultural happenings. Its mission is to tell the story of the objects and the history of the Luigi Bonotto Collection, which is deeply intertwined with its founder, while also fostering new conversations among art, industrial production, craftsmanship and contemporary culture. This work includes digitizing all documents and making them freely accessible online, ensuring genuine global access and dissemination. The archive is extraordinarily extensive, and its cataloguing has required years of sustained effort.
Among its holdings is the singular story of what later became known as Dick Higgins’ “Intermedia Chart,” a pioneering diagram that articulated the reality of contemporary transmedia and intermedia art. Bonotto explained it originated as the “Molvena Chart,” created so Higgins could describe him using a visual diagram that transcended language barriers. It proved so effective that Higgins later recreated it on a computer and incorporated it into his publications, where it became a lasting reference in art history.
At the same time, Fondazione Bonotto promotes artistic and intellectual work by commissioning installations and curatorial programs, overseeing the publication of magazines, books, catalogues, printed materials and digital editions, and organizing exhibitions, seminars and conferences in which young artists and curators engage directly with the material in the Collection.
What makes the Bonotto case so rare is that it remains one of the few genuinely rooted examples of enlightened patronage, where a company does not instrumentalize culture but actively generates it, and where production and cultural practice function as a single, integrated entity. In Bonotto’s trajectory, art and culture were never investments but a sincere mission born from passion, one that grew into relationships, shared research, discoveries and, above all, human exchange. It was a path in which art and life fused, evolving into a cultural project that, in turn, strengthened the company itself, shaping its methods, identity and vision. In this sense, the entire Luigi Bonotto story becomes a single “Total Artwork,” which, as he often said, is the true miracle.
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