Solo exhibition Catalogue, in Italian language, essay by M. Bologna, at "Campaiola" Gallery of Rome,
November-December 1989, ed. "Campaiola" Gallery.



"Not available-out of print"





Catalogue essay


MARIO BOLOGNA


      Vincenzo Balsamo extracts from his, by now along, "virtuous exercise" a obscurity of sumptuous tonality or veered to the monochrome and introduces it with a silence of the titles that shows the area of the sense but invite in the same time to patrol before the wall up of the "city of copper," because only the periplus of delay could create a passage. The picture of ampler reference is that result of the figurative culture of 20th century in which the querelles between naturalism and abstraction, between stay and escaped from the system paint decay in a synthesis or in a syncretism that finds an of the possible formulations and versions in the mediatress and peremptory simile of Klee: the art is like the tree, that takes root in the earth but causes fruits I diverged from the earth.

     Beyond of the impression of the mosaic of echoes that we deep to summery, keep to yourself an other sign, and it is the linearism with which Balsamo moves the autography of the image in the gang of the clear and it goes to become part in the history of the line, along the run that from the East of Utamaro and Hokusai has carried this word of pure invention, and but endless generating of forms, to Gauguin, to Klimt, to Beardsley and through such importing and interpreters in the contemporary art, that with his aesthetics of the inventory he has extrapolated from the objective and chromatic context confering to it the vertiginous right of the solo.

     The two coordinates, if not the key of the sense, they disclose the sense of the process creative of Balsamo; that are originated from the Klee of return from Egypt from the memories of fantastic calligraphies and of adorned Islamic that bring again some, and one develop for deviations that other cultural echoes engrave of preserve with other psychological displays. In the textures of "Ad Parnassum," in the tangle perspective of the "Principal road and secondary roads," in the landscapes with houses and trees summery the line of Klee appears on the surface from the earth, under the epidermis phenomenologycal worn-up, and mark the fibers, the plot of the substratum, the forms archetype that the childish sketch, in his perspicacities am mistaken, it presages. The line of Balsamo extends it also to the synthesis of the abstract forms, but he don't program it, he doesn't set it to the beginning: initially he is unaware, like taking from a slow energy, from a inertial and erratic motorbike. It doesn't affect; not line: flyover, the bottom is only a planet that assures the orientation, a theater of evolutions that don't influence. Without therefore transfigure in pure and motionless spatiality: Balsamo has conceived a surface where the cloths virgins, the jutes, the hemps and the gauzes of Klee transport in pictoric fabric, the divisionism and the "seeding of points" of color go beyond in thin chromatics warps that they recall the exactness and the preciousness of superimposed landing-nets.

     It is a bottom that doesn't contemplate impressionistic values: enmeshed from the regularity of the plot, contrasts and variations of tone more that visual stimuli and atmospheric mutability give birth to a diffused brightness, issued, it would be told, from a calm combustion and uniform; a brightness that is not reflected, don't guess a relationship of interaction with the drawing plain. To the passage of the line the chromatic fabric seems to articulate in zones and at times change color up to the phosphorescence, like following a chiaroscuro of temperatures. Really the surface stays to the from here of each dynamics and it decline the life stylized of a symbol. Also when the line closes of the forms and it cut out zones of color in contrast, it is not recorded an event on the bottom: those forms are impressed on of him like shades of events that end aloft. The modulation and the partitions of the surface, to well see, they bear from a hedonistic feeling of the color exalted from the technical virtuosity; they constitute a "calligraphy" chromatic parallel to the drawing calligraphy. It start here to delineate the key of reading of these arcane tables. Balsamo evades his model, to the cognitive painting and search if same in the psychological painting; experimenting a prospecting of the reality, he flows back in the reflex that it projects in the longing interior life and magic.

     To the boundary of that subjectivity that has identified and introduced the art modern in the trajectory of the dissolution, Balsamo recognizes the inevitableness of the dialectical between instinct and rule, analysis and synthesis of the form, nature 'naturante' and nature 'naturata'. Like in the color stay, in last analysis, classical, if the distance is thought about that it divides it from the tache; as in the graphic declination it is stolen from unprejudiced deed, to the his effect poetically reduced and to the incumbent lead to the hallucinated signs of Michaux. The line in which is reflected completely the poetic. Aerate a melody modulated on a chromatic leading polyphony, but developed it overcome the psychological valence. In front of the endless, to the "bad endless" of Hegel, of the line wandered and unstoppable, Balsamo experiments that the only by it of exit is the return to the finished, and he find again the forms in formation of Mirò and the simple forms and the symbols and the signals of Klee: auroral figures or survivings that he interpret again on an own background, individual in the memory; in a settled memory, expeditious beyond of the emotions like that fixed on the carpets and on the obelisks.

     Balsamo, finally, illuminates a place of the mind in which the object, the dangerous < i> Nicht Ich, and the manifold motorbike of the life arriving in forms that arouses a vision unperturbed perspective. This place is the painting, agreement like construction self-reflex that subdues the reality to the logic of the line and of the color in way to forward it in an aesthetical-formal dimension that the expose to a taller perception: the time, reduced to arrow of the time adapted to the confluence of two ascending 'calligrammi', it comes neutralized and, therefore same, perceived philosophically. It is a hypothesis that forces ancient antinomies, but that it shade a his plausibility here. After all, Broch retains that the thought follows spatial schemes; and Kandinskij teaches (to the Bauhaus) that the roots of the numerical systems meet with the roots of the forms artistic. I understand tell that the thought pictoric that thinks if same, polarizeted from the dynamics of the lines and from the chemistry of the color, it can cause forms significant equally; and that have tested this ellipsis it is a it deals with Balm that hocks the judgment, together with the qualitative tension from insert in the actual chronicles like a low "rappel à l'ordre".

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