Painting - Balbi Art Gallery

Leonardo Balbi Painter - leonardo@balbi.com

ABSTRACTS

Balbi's informal abstract paintings are paradoxically a pictorial recreation of nature, reproduced on the canvas with its incommensurable richness, subtle combinations and magical chords. Balbi's works breathe the harmony of nature, exalt its beauty and immense variety.
To Balbi, art is a synonym of joy, a moment of pure freedom when he can liberate his mind from the ties of rational thought often limiting our expressive ability. It is an extremely relieving act as well as a powerful catalyst, where the artist can pour the intensity of his emotions.

In Balbi’s abstract paintings, reality is distorted and made unrecognizable. Only the use of colour and the chromatic combinations seem to maintain contact with real life. Powerful vehicles for communicating emotions, they not only translate what the artist feels and experiences in his relationship with nature, but also serve as a way to exalt those feelings. The colour plays the starring role on the canvas, where it is used to create the image of what the artist wants to represent. So, endless layers of light blue on the canvas evoke the beauty of the sea and its extraordinary brightness, while the force of light-dark, with the colour scraped and superimposed, imitates the constant rippling of waves. By a masterly use of colour, the artist tries to imitate the nature, transferring on his paintings the feelings and emotions that only the nature can give us. Reproducing the colours of the soils means conveying its fragrance, variety and richness. Catching a landscape is recreating on canvas that feeling of happiness we all feel when we are, for example, in a field full of flowers. The artist finds in nature the source of inspiration, the sense of joy and freedom that only art is capable of transmitting. The ‘art-nature’ equivalence depicts the artist’s inner soul: painting for the pleasure of creating, creating as the only real act of freedom.