Vito Apuleo

     The visual experience that characterizes the research of our times continues to use objectual relationships in perpetual oscillation. This means a perpetual alternation of prospectical urges that cyclically moves from the image to the concept and vice-versa, with some moments of reflection inclined to connect the extremes of space left to variants. This movement appears in the sphere of a choice iteration related to the ancient dispute between the ethic way and the aesthetic way, between mental engagement and linguistic question, to withdraw from nature this quantity of materc silences and shades and to bring it to the essence of image.
    In spite of any hypothesis of death or overstructural annihilation, art shows its wrinkles but prepares itself in a constant process of generation, adapting to history and following the utopia of renewal.
     According to this we find the crossing, the quotations, the passage from metaphisics to expressive attitude due to a daily spontaneous casualness, characterized by the appearance and disappearance of object-subject proposed in its strctural organicity aiming to overcome the limit of definition of art as synthesis of feeling and image.
    This involves the idea that in the variegated experience of a world where platonic and aermethic tradition coexist with magic and theosophy, vitalistic exaltation alternates with existential alienation.
    This brings to a polarity of kind of research that alternates the clearness of Mondrian or Malevic forms and on the other side, looks at the integration between nature and geometry, postulated by Kandinskij and Klee. In the middle we find Picasso, De Chirico, Duchamp and a Doctor Freud.
    This formulation may be recollected to history handbooks but it is undoubtedly true the renewal of linguistic solicitations in this path suggest itself as a connective element, able to probe a question when requested by the examination of a contemporary artist.
     We will make reference to this interpretation to read the work of Vincenzo Balsamo, not only related to his pictorial proposition but amid the different stages of this changes. This approach confirms the belief that the artist's choices grow up in a slow ripening and increasing association to history.
     Many changes occurred from the 60's when Balsamo followed a figurative way shaped on naturalistic patterns, full of materic chromatism insistently bound to landscape visions, expressed with wide, large stroke 'à la tache', inspired by the old longed faraway South. At those times, Ugo Mannoni wrote about Balsamo "the image of natural landscape patterns in Balsamo's paintings is brought to perfection by innate sufference. The prevailing colours, deep blue and different hues of green, do evoke nightmares that live in the instinctual sphere. Those themes are the setting, impasted by the whites made red-hot by the metaphorical thirst that accompained Balsamo when he left Puglia.
    And they mingled with the new colours the artist found in Rome: blazing and indecent, freezed by time on the ruins covered with ivy and brillant flowers".
     We may underline the mood of this creative season, the sincerity of temporality ruled by the chromatic texture that spacing, when not didascalic, canalizes where compositive syntax pursues the skeim of strng tones to testify the trust of the artist in nature.
     And this applies to the description of mountain neture open to light as to the slow running of Latium hills in the rude sweetness of slopes surrounded by silence. We may add to this attitude the tickness of coagulated substance, sometimes spread and written with semplicity, ad a constant alarm in the realm of reality: a sort of challenge surely naif and fragile, to the tensions belonging to the artistic research of the period. And this challenge gave way to a practial knowledge of pictorial means ans expressive aims.
     If we consider those landscape again, we discover the particular angle of Balsamo's painting. We may guess the use of volumes and surfaces, and the dialectics between colour and structure, connecting the different sections of painting, alternately linked to reproduce, in an elementary way, geomatrical fields, stratifications and sedimentations directed to complete a vision through permeating light.
     In the highest pages of that season, we do not percieve any imaginative story through anecdotes but we give them the seal of archetypes, the anticipative dimension of his absolute determination of present solutions.
     Balsamo creates the most recent proposition, coherent to the same operative order: the growing process developed in the space and colour organization on the prerimetral space of support. He repeats the formal warp pursuing the dialectic relationship between sign and colour. He underlines he space gap but he developes the poetic of abstraction cojugating, in his own way, the integration of nature and geometry postulated by Kandinskij and Klee, already mentioned, and the general lesson of historical avantgardes. The artist uses the expressive means of painting with absolute freedom and catalogues data in order to establish a private touch which the swiftness of optical and prospectical moviment makes dynamic. As a matter of fact Balsamo yearnes for a dialectical relationship where man, the meaningful element, is still present in spite of his physical absence. His aim is reached when, in the increasing process of form, the elusive image creates, as a fluenty breath, peculiar suspensions where his awareness ripes comletely.
     Balsamo is conscious of the inner world he expresses and the external materials he works with, and he steps to a place where he can look in himself and at the past, sure that from a sincere relationship of these components may rise a general urge able to open new horizons without falling in abused quotations and revival.
     The innovating will of avant-garde is his immediate past that permeates a vision evolved in an unusual enlivening power, never satisfied by simple reality. A power able to give the pure force of simplicity, a sensation of dignity, a renewed tension to actuality, enlarging the expressive space with experience.
     Balsamo assumes the aesthetic proceeding as a behaviour pattern and in his abstract choice, he conveys the artist's desire to comunicate, to fit his own specific language to the opportunities of dialogue that present time offers. We may easily refer to Gombrich's thought: "the private, personal, psychological significance of painting is the only real meaning, transmitted if not to the con-scious world of the onlooking to his unconscious one".
     Balsamo previleges this involvement in the perceptive space on sensorial and conceptual basis. He gives up the new expression of the manierist method and the repetition of optional choices of the new geometry and cold abstraction. His research aims to globally solve the problem of language.
     Language, as he considers it, overcomes appearance and relates various experiences of reality, leading them to unity through a prismatic interpretation of the outer world. Balsamo defines his vision in the synthesis of multiple and articulated perceptions, and he avoids an excessive fragmentation of representation. He gives new life to the concept of duration in Bergon's thought and uses Kandinskij metaphores of vital uncertainties.
     Sign, line, colour, light, music are the leading structures of his research. Balsamo uses a method of considering artistic phenomena as the creative tension recovery which in its vitalistic principles is ready to find roots and functions amid the hints of artistic experience.
     He has the skill to discover the symbolic values of changing forms in fixed spaces and different combinations and relations. In spite of his rage, ("there is a sort of grudge in Balsamo's paintings" wrote Ugo Mannoni about the artist in the 60's.) he follows an optimistic language. He must take part in the purpose. He longs for a Weltanschauung and the vision of the world that does not itself in an unfruitful scattering. He does not oppose a nihilistic indifference to the nihilism of this century. His choice of observing the world has its foundation on artistic language as a deep internal necessity that overcomes the monotonous repetition of elemental schemes. He goes beyond the weak thought' and find the right orientation to disentangle himself among the daily solicitations of the civilisation of images. He does not try to untie the knots of all avantgarde experiences to determinate a linear net of relations but he finds some ways where he reassured himself trough the expressions of the "possible".
     His recent compositions works on subtle inlays and an abstract geometry that create joints, helicoidal spaces, volumes playing on psychological and enviroment changes. His path shows a construction arranged on weft and texture where a strong sign emerges and either cut the space out or cut it diagonally, as a dynamic vision that produces a junction of figure and icon.
     If Balsamo recalls the visual direction through jouful colour hues, light covers the structural models, wraps them in prospectial space, evokes natural images opened to charming paths. In his lyrical abstraction, the visual production of Balsamo changes from one painting to another, with a rigotous control on chromatic texture. He runs after the tension point where neither horizontal and vertical concepts, nor nature and history exist, but, on the contary, a sketch of signs of an ideal pentagram writes a perfect partiture where strings overhang brass.
     In this way he allows a true approach to his painting and avoids the danger of snobbery that a careless reading may suggest. An option way of operating is the fulfilment of a labyrintical path, a real project that understates his choices, meditated steps that Balsamo potentially verifies in hispictorial text.
     The exaltation of colour that characterizes the new artistic season is meditated. A thick colour brush pulsating in an handicraft process, in the determination to find exalting artfulness. This art fulness underlines the theorical presuppositions that give way to visual communication and chromatic and light refraction. Balsamo operates through the intelligence of the exposition in fragmental poetry, using axiomatic processes. He expands the painting fields, integrates the same fragments and unifles them in a subtle line. We are witness of a deep meditation on this painting that overcomes the mood and leads to Klee's thought: "the logical foundation of figurative idea is determinated by the painting surface and follows its own specific ways". And, "Figurative art never starts from a mood or a poetical idea, but from the construction of one or two figures, the harmony of colours and tonal values...".
     Klee and Kandinskij and Mirò in a way, are the models of Balsamo's attempt to deepen the formal education he believes in. He is persistent in the research of a language that peacefully complies with the expressive potentiality emerging from his need of communication.
     These symptons, and certainties and vision of the world flow together in the constant evolution that qualifies his research. His sign writes the story of crossing, a subtler, sinuous, fragile sign that mimes the flight of butterfly, the whim of clouds, the thread the child tremblingly holds looking at the evolution of a polychrome kite.
     Apparently weak, the thread is strong, tight, and ready to create new flight path and win its battle against time. Courage is always present in Balsamo's experience and his research spontaneously leaded is like a purification bath that give a new magic energy to tones and volumes. His pages is animated by lines, points, modulations and waive-motions similar to natural mavements: the wind blowing on high grass, the curve of a rainbow in the air, the echo oa a bunch of sounds coming from a mental construction perfectly logical. The decorative touch looses harmony, in the allusive appearance of order where his taste for elegant plays relies upon a prose of melodical lines and brillant "a solo".
     The eleboration and cohordination of these sounds carries Balsamo to a gathering use of joints, a sort of "collage" or puzzle where evocative, geomatric modules are unceasingly repeated and create fancied and airy entreaties of memory alternated to some linear resting places where dissonancies are effaced. Centripetal and centrifugal lines connect crystal fragments and suggestions of colours as produced by light passing through a window. It is not the evocative and grave light of a gotic rose-window, blazing in the ogival arch of a dark and mysterious cathedral, but, on the contrary, the joyful light of window opened on the countryside or on the sea, or on the sweet melancholy of a square at sunset, full of round-about sounds and colours.
     Balsamo's painting is a subtle and precious fantasy. It is the outcome of his effort to gently offer the sweet sensation of time and the natural contribution to a long term project developed on colour stratification that gradually conquers the page, modifies it and settles till a complete domination of issues. Balsamo transforms the emotional suggestion of the artist into reflection. He sincerely desires to discover the fascination of material and spiritual potentialities of a world ridden, only in the excitement of fantasy, of the dull trivialitu of daily life.

Top