Jason Balducci

About Jason Balducci

I'm an Italian Visual artist currently living in Toronto, Canada. My driving force is to push further into experimentation and the unknown. I can say that It's like a personal quest to find that something that you haven't found yet, an expression of inner feelings that represents the invisible to others. For me Art, in general, is the best expression of the human being and a universal language that breaks all the possible barriers. I do paintings, mainly portraits. In painting a portrait the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person. It’s why portrait paintings are so fascinating and difficult. Most people go to the most academic painters when they want to have their portraits made because for some reason they prefer a sort of color photographs of themselves instead of thinking of having themselves really caught and trapped on the canvas. The model is someone made of blood and flesh and what has to be caught in their spirit and emanation of energy. I paint people because I truly think that art is an obsession with life and after all, as we are human beings, our greatest obsession is with ourselves. I very much prefer working from the photographs taken to people I know, my models are most of times people I had the chance to know so that while transporting their image on canvas I can add characteristics that I remember through shapes and colours. I couldn’t attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn’t know but, if I both know them and have photographs of them, I find it easier to work than actually having their presence in my studio. I think that if I have the presence of the model in my room I won’t be able to drift so freely as i am with the photographic image. I feel free when I’m alone with their memory, it allows me to distort the thing far beyond the appearances.