Al pianoforte (2009) Painting

Vincenzo Balsamo (painter, engraver), was born in Brindisi, in 1935, he lived in Rome, Paris, Verona and now he lives in Corchiano (VT). He exhibited, several times in national and international fairs, galleries and museums, since Figurative works of the fifties and sixties, over the seventies with the periods of the First Abstraction, the "Decomposition" informal period, of matter work; to the "Nebulas" where the sign prevails on colour; to the "Evocations" of surreal calls; to the Second Abstraction (Return to the painting), of the first eighties that closes the "Analysis and experimentation" period. Since 1987 began the "Lyric abstraction", the sign, the colour, and the light are made up among them as if they would peer into the human "I". Vincenzo Balsamo is today one of the most important Italian artists of the abstraction. The two basic expressive elements used by Vincenzo Balsamo are signs and light. The signs are "docile and obedient", and sometimes assume an automatic character pursuing forms and figures that seem to acquire consistencly only when they are "named", or made to appear upon the canvas, by the artist. Balsamo's expressive intention has nothing to do with fixing static images on the surface of the picture. On the contrary, he chases after those lines which form the images; images that mingle and then shatter in a constant, unending and open process. Reading what happens on the canvas, therefore, necessarily imlies and emotional response that involves both the artist and the viewer to the same extent. It is a fantastic game in which many figurative elements can be perceived at a personal level - a face, a micro- organism, a kite - in a vision that, despite appearances, is anything but non-obiective. It is, if anything, closer to dream, a place in which the lines of geometry and imagination can exist together in a harmonious dimension that has no need to justify itself. The light plays a very significant role in Balsamo's art because it annuls the physical quality of the material-colour and accentuates the surreal atmosphere within which definitive images appear. It is clear at this point that Balsamo's formal references move constantly backwards and forwards between his great historic maters, Klee and Mir. I mean by this simply that Balsamo does not ignore the paths that have already been trodden by figurative art.