Vincenzo Balsamo's Page

(Painter/Engraver) Vincenzo Balsamo was born in June 1935 in Brindisi, Italy. He lived in Rome, Paris, Verona, now he lives in Corchiano, Italy. He studied at the San Giacomo Art School, Rome. Main exhibitions took place at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, National Gallery of Modern Art, X National Quadrennial, Chiostro del Bramante - (Rome); European Biennial - DUBROVNIK; Découvertes Nef Victor, Carrousel du Louvre - (Paris); "Santa Apollonia" Art Center Venezia, Nagahama Museum - (Japan); Museum of Modern Art - Arezzo; Matalon Museum - Milan; 4th Beijing International Art Biennial; Modern Art Gallery - Cento; Lu.C.C.A. Center of Contemporary Art - Lucca; A.C. Art Museum Beijing, Yixing Art Museum, Guangzhou Mayland Art Gallery, European Commission - Brussels; Art Fairs: Shanghai, Miami, New York, Canton, Moscow, New Delhi, Los Angeles, KIAF, Beijing, Toronto, In Arco, London, Bologna; Milano, Torino, Verona, etc.; and several participations in biennial/triennial of print.

Vincenzo Balsamo paints since the fifties. His first artworks are figurative paintings. They regard Italian landscapes (Tuscany, Umbria, Lazio, Campania) particularly intense and intimate where the pictorial technique, composed by vibrant brush strokes, delights in a sort of play of fantastic tonalities.

During the seventies Balsamo stops painting figurative works: It is the so-called “first abstraction” period where he actually returns to the coloured background of the landscapes, but without a hint of figuration and separated by a black sign that becomes the texture of the memory. During the late seventies Balsamo researches and experiments.

Decomposizioni (1975-76) are informal, material, full bodied works, harsh in their pictorial expression.

Nebulose (1977-78) are not envisaged as a celestial world, but as a mental and internal journey in search of the right balance between the gestural mark and - alongside and upon - the colour.

Evocazioni (1978-79) are complex and introspective works characterized by strangely  deformed, surreal and fantastic figures, symptoms of weariness and doubt.

In the early eighties Balsamo strives to regain his expressive thought and spends time at his easel in order to rediscover a new, more congenial world. It is the so-called “second abstraction” period and he paints works inspired by an abstract-cubistic concept.

In 1987 begins the “Lyrical Abstraction” phase where the sign, the colour and the light are made up among them as if they would peer into the human "I"

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The sign, the light and the colour are the main elements of my art. To me, painting is like playing a sort of expressive game, it is an operation that I perform under the sign of grace and lightness. The images come out from a dream that could be called "The place where the geometric lines and imagination live together". The sign outlines the form, the colour connotes the emotional field, the light dematerializes the vision that appears unobjective just apparently.

Thanks to my Mediterranean origins, I have discovered the beauty of the light and the infinity of the black line that separates the sky and the sea at the horizon. All of those elements have a deep, inner, mystical and philosophical value.

In my works lives a part of myself, an inspiring emotion: a dream or a thought, the past or the present, a song, classical or modern music or simply the eternal emotion of the waves.

My hand seems to be guided by a "superior" willing, I paint in symbiosis with the canvas, while the external world becomes extraneous to me... My ideas are expressed as a synthesis and I immortalize my memories on the painted surfaces so that the observer's interpretation can bring them to life.

My artworks could contain messages, but I prefer to leave each visitor free to see and to feel what he wants and prefers. To me, the first point is not to leave a particular message, but to create an emotion and I am really happy when someone tells me that a picture of mine has given him a vivid emotion.

...Maybe I paint what we know to be existing, but we do not really see or touch, in form of synthesis and actual thought. Light is life. I always find new and insightful stimuli in the light and the luminescence is the way to enter into my world through a complete participation.

I love to use the oil on canvas technique, but I also paint using tempera and/or watercolours on paper.

I like painting etchings, too. After printing, I paint with watercolours many of my etchings.