RANDOM SHEETS FROM AN ARTIST’S BOOK

2017

HANJI PAPER THROUGH LUISA BALICCO'S HANDS

The word Hanji has a very simple translation, that is "Korean paper", as Han means Korea and Ji is paper. Actually it is not merely a type of "paper", as it also gathers the Korean tradition of culture, creativity and innovation.

Reference to culture is made because this paper has very ancient origins, as it was the instrument used to pass on a great deal of Korean historical heritage. Creativity is brought up because over the centuries, several artists among others employed this medium to express themselves. And finally innovation is mentioned because at present, as in the past, this paper finds the most diverse applications in everyday life.

Luisa Balicco is well aware of this paper's value and she wanted to pay tribute to Hanji paper and its tradition by celebrating Jikji. Printed in 1377, Jikji is the first book in the world produced with a metal movable type printing system, even before Gutenberg's 78 year old bible.

So Sintesi Ieratica (Hieratic Synthesis) sees the light, a tribute to Jikji, two sets of hands creating a work of art to connect Jinkji to the two roots of printing: Hanji paper and metal working. It's not by chance that we have two sets of hands in this joint project, those of Luisa Balicco and Ignazio Bellini, the craftsman-artist who has been working with metal his entire life.

Sinestesia Sacra (Sacred Synesthesia) becomes a tribute to Jikji thanks to an Italian artist and her creative spirit, who was able to innovate this text through her artistic reinterpretation which matched this versatile paper with metal working. Nowadays Hanji paper is appreciated both from artists and paper conservators due to its translucency, resistance, adaptability and purity, springing from the mulberry tree fibers from which it is made.

Nella Poggi Parigi

WITH HANJII PAPER

Luisa Balicco's research originates from an experience that is utterly other than the narrative and descriptive perspectives, and in which fantasy does not fade and the dream becomes a recurring state. The emerging intent goes toward an execution rooted in its own nature to respond to the driving thoughts and qualmish look. HANJI paper colors are turned into emotion, the gesture becomes reflection leaving a mark in the entangled threads between sensitivity and execution. It conjures the desire for a neutral code by nature, especially for us, who are so used and obsessed by contrast: high-low, good-evil. For its very nature, HANJI paper enables her to venture in the multiple revelations of the apparent world made of impermanent and inconsistent senses and head towards an unqualified and unqualifiable reality of emptiness with a detached and peaceful look at the impersonal flowing of things: silent contemplation. Graceful shapes and beautiful cuts can be forgotten, but the abundance of nature will give birth to other shapes, other sequels, other loneliness, to which names and voices would be unknown and but they survive in the shadow of contemplative history for their beauty-harmony-diversity. The books and paintings on display are stations of the subsequent personal itineraries needed to construct mental dwellings in perennial development. The use of HANJII paper recalls processions of colors and gestures for paper turned into fabric, silks, veils. Colors which might belong to unlikely atmospheres, landscapes with hues deflecting to different brightness, radiance of eastern places and temples. On display we do not have the result of some assembling operation, but images, concepts, intuitions developed with tact and discretion, and longing for scrupulousness, silence and slowness to distance oneself form the chitchat and deafening noise of everyday buzz. Luisa Balicco's analysis is not a devote and humble submission to our times nor the impudent compliance to grasp market space but rather a self-aware attempt to contrast the possible depersonalization or our times. She fails to impose any use or purpose to HANJI's materiality but yet she enhances its natural malleability, brightness and texture. In living her quest, she aspires to bring to life a new sacredness, which failed to be revealed by any religion or philosophy.

Ignazio Bellini

HANJI PAPER - THE CUSTODIAN OF HISTORY

Why choosing such a title for this exhibition? Because we can not disregard thousands years of history, cultural references and the days of a glorious past outreaching over time, nor even avoid stepping into the reign of impermanence or "emptiness" for a mental venture or the impersonal flowing of things. While observing Luisa in her atelier, I asked her the reason why she had chosen HANJI paper. As it happens, I expected an answer with meanings, reasons, semantic implications and the alike. On the contrary, I received an unexpected as much as a composed and placid "because I like it". Analyzing her craft works more closely, I could perceive them as exercises, meditation moments, a silent contemplation of things. For that matter, meditation has nothing to share with prayer, as verbal appeal is not involved, leave alone making requests to any goddess. Therefore it is not an aesthetic or decorative event, but rather intertwined perceptive and sensory stimuli silently weaving her project that investigated the unknown condition of being a woman. Touching HANJI texture, observing its translucency, weave, malleability, brightness, lucidity made the value of lightness surface in her, a new compositional rhythm of peculiar balance, chasing the pleasure of describing the dream expelled from the cage of rationality. For the moment she has relinquished the high density, scraped, scratched, eroded paper. In her exhibited works I perceive how the illusory monologue can turn into a dialogue transcending her times, in order to tie distant times and places through the threads of research. Luisa Balicco's research originates from an experience that is utterly other than the narrative and descriptive perspectives, and in which fantasy does not fade and the dream becomes a recurring state. The emerging intent goes toward an execution rooted in its own nature to respond to the driving thoughts and qualmish look. HANJI paper colors are turned into emotion, the gesture becomes reflection leaving a mark in the entangled threads between sensitivity and execution. It conjures the desire for a neutral code by nature, especially for us, who are so used and obsessed by contrast: high-low, good-evil. For its very nature, HANJI paper enables her to venture in the multiple revelations of the apparent world made of impermanent and inconsistent senses and head towards an unqualified and unqualifiable reality of emptiness with a detached and peaceful look at the impersonal flowing of things: silent contemplation. Graceful shapes and beautiful cuts can be forgotten, but the abundance of nature will give birth to other shapes, other sequels, other loneliness, to which names and voices would be unknown and but they survive in the shadow of contemplative history for their beauty-harmony-diversity. The books and paintings on display are stations of the subsequent personal itineraries needed to construct mental dwellings in perennial development. The use of HANJII paper recalls processions of colors and gestures for paper turned into fabric, silks, veils. Colors which might belong to unlikely atmospheres, landscapes with hues deflecting to different brightness, radiance of eastern places and temples. On display we do not have the result of some assembling operation, but images, concepts, intuitions developed with tact and discretion, and longing for scrupulousness, silence and slowness to distance oneself form the chitchat and deafening noise of everyday buzz. Luisa Balicco's analysis is not a devote and humble submission to our times nor the impudent compliance to grasp market space but rather a self-aware attempt to contrast the possible depersonalization or our times. She fails to impose any use or purpose to HANJI's materiality but yet she enhances its natural malleability, brightness and texture. In her determined isolation she pursues the image trait by trait, color by color, while swiftness and slowness take turns in accurate progression through seductive images and fragments of sophisticated miniatures. In living her quest, she aspires to bring to life a new sacredness, which failed to be revealed by any religion or philosophy.

De Rerum

2014

CARDS FOR BOOKS AND PAPERS, REFLECTIONS AND TRAVEL NOTES

Ignazio Bellini

Luisa Balicco: to fully understandherresearch operations it is useful to underline that they arise from the relationship with the places intended as a “ genius loci” searched in districts often forgotten, immaterial itinerary stops, impregnated with a time far removed from measurements of clocks and calendars, where those differences giving meaning to travel still persist. This is one of the subjects on which the author will come back more than once, in a relationship between the places and our vision of the world.

At first glance the works appear as some containers of paper but in fact they are also intended as sketches for probable staging from which to enunciate stories and testimonials.

In fact, there is also a dramatic appearance, alluding to the concept of an isolated form for a theatrical space. Forms simulacrum where the original meaning of the totemic spirits has replaced others meanings, relevant to the reality of today.

If the places reveal inspirations that can weaken as the years and decades go by, her perceptions are strengthened until they become uncontainable, as if insistingardently on the expressive power, on the fascination of what lies crumbled and buried under the crushing weight of a real or apparent neglect.

It is no coincidence that in her works ( how not to mention the dance of Shiva) you experience dynamic currents of colour that take shape and disrupt, overwhelm the feelings and regenerate them in the coloursof turquoise burnished water, in the messy and mouldy dark, in the pearly luminescence of soft and gentle lights. What takes shape is discarded in metallic and velvety layers, with deep reflexes, fragments of colour, things, thoughts, traces of shapes, shadows of shapes, with the desire to identify the details neglected, inconspicuous, which have their own greatness, though always different, temporary, blurred, fleeting, almost imperceptible to a common viewer.

Marginal areas where underground rivers are flowing fluidly, where the imagination is the opportunity to discover, in the fibres of reality, the space of adventure hidden in the folds of nature.

Similarly to the lands of the East, whereit is customary to hang onsinuous branches of ancient woods some cards and colourful clothes, torn and scattered by the wind, and which the sun does turn, inexorably, in other colours: harmonious and dissonant, vigorous and emaciated. Drapes forgotten, yetstill expressive of the state of the soul.

Such images overlapping to the myth of those parties called “ Floralia” in honour of Flora, the Roman goddess of spring and flowers, who scattered the buds collected in the folds of her robe, dispersing them with the help of Zephyr, God of the fertile west wind.

Missing things, that are no longer accessible other than through their spectra, emerge and become present in those forms in danger of extinction like the words, ideas, languages that have generated them.

Well, now cards appear, symbolic luggage, fragments of ancient traditions elaboratedwith material vulnerable to human manipulation and weathering of time.

The cards are chosen for the calligraphic compositions and traces of the inks, for the smooth or absorbentsurfaces, ideal for capturing the expressive and gestural nature of the brush.

They are the body of the research, vague body, white as bones, on which to imagine the time of life.

Why vague body? For Leopardi, as Italo Calvino remembered in “ Talks with a writer” the language is more poetic as it is vague, imprecise, but the indeterminacy requires extreme accuracy and precision for the composition of each image, both in the definition of the details and in the choice of the atmosphere.

Therefore vagueness as accuracy that captures the subtlest feelings with a selective and analytical mind through safe hands and intuition of the relationship between the hand and the thing, between the eye and the subject.

In writing of her graphic stories, Luisa Balicco predominantly uses the paper that she creates.

It is rough paper of substantial weight without defined edges, intentionally frayed.

Overlaps of other nature are visible, sheets of various sizes and shades, coupons as small loading platforms for her travel diaries, for graphic-written narratives, sometimes dark, full of genuine pathos, some other times more ethereal as clouds, and yet never absent of corporeality and fiction fascination. The choice of handcraftedpaper is compulsory for her, and the treatment of this material requires breath control, fluidityand immediacy, rigorous gesture where the idea without a second thought is translated into shape, colour, patience and discipline.

Another aspect that can be useful to learn more about the author is that she is proud to call herself a vegetarian, but believe me, she lies.

I knowfor a factthat in the laboratory of herworkshop she is an unrepentant “paper eater”.

Luisa treats the paper in different ways, enhancing its rigidity, its flexibility, and the suggestions of its shades, where they appear as guiding subjects driving the studies of her travels to the east, the experiments she carried out in the National Trust of England and in the botanical gardens, as well as in the tiny garden of her house. Strips of land to the inhabitants of shadyburrows,of carpets of ferns where to wander over a calm sea, shrugged, so to speak, only by a slight breeze of wind that to others would bring nothing else, if not boredom and futility.

Herguiding spirit is developed on a continuous process of calculations designed to characterize the nature of the paper, as the dimmed brightness, the hint of delicate or intense shadows, where the secret lies with the paper itself, with the exploration of the indeterminate, which becomes the observation of the manifold.

In the research, it may appear that the interest in the story of humansare peripheral to the stories themselves, but on closer examination, memories and references to a different humanity do emerge, as perceived from different angles, both in the everyday observation and in the living in close contact of the events and the experienced.

I cannot avoid remembering the words of Italo Calvino, where he alleged that:

The purpose of the research work consists in giving expression to the events, without the aim of documenting with real images whathappened and what still happens. Being able to identify a number of tracks even though the bulk of the evidence remains invisible, sensing the presence of thin filaments without being able to trace its origin.

Recurring images of what was seen also in the fields of restraint and rehabilitation, not only of the West, but also in the western amnesia of the places of the East.

It is the discovery of a reality in which the abuse, the outrage, the oppression have become rules, holocausts and genocides without noise, muffled.

In the images of the forms there is no intent to chronicle but a meaning more general and pervasive, like the teeth of time.

The records of livid spots, the abrasions on the paper as scars and bruises, the colours that become earthen, emaciated, pale, the attack to the painterly look: all these elements present, without the obvious impact of the macabre, the unmistakable terms of the atrocities of history, the crude ideologies of the re-education camps, the rites of the rational, the ferocity that has raped, robbed and humiliated humanity in its most intimate essence, in its own biological existence, forcing it to make deviant choices, where the light first becomes shadow and finally inexorable darkness. Long and miserable heroic history of abuse and neglect in a croak of images, screeching and discordant notes that go down deep into the ears.

Nor is it forgetful of a society with the desire of existential opacity, confused, drowned in the most trivial forms of paper advertising, symbols of the fantasies lined up in the folkloric markets, which represent other messages in code, full of versatile, essentialpromises, like the most ubiquitous of the forms thatpaper can take: the most luxurious one that intoxicates us with that stench that smells of exclusive luxury, but also deformed reservoirs of collective memory.

That is all what suggests, in an ephemeral way, a guarantee, a signature, a promise, the same that Warhol, with a skilfultrick and a good sleight of hand, has made us all familiar with.

For her the paper, even whendeprivedof its primary purpose, can be evocative as the remains of old posters pasted on the walls that weigh as previous remnants, to the point that the new ones almost cannotadhere. Mosaic covers, coulters that thicken gradually while all the spaceis taken up, drapes that fall back until reaching the floor.

The thick crust clinging to a wall eventually peels, clotting itself in layersand cracks where, under those tears and those cuts, we can still see traces of other tattered posters in decomposition, almost like sick cards. However, we may find there new landscapes, fanciful architectures in ruins, references to pictorial worlds and perhaps the possibility of giving, to the unsuspecting gluersof card on the stone walls, the laurel of unintentional artists: hyperbole? Perhaps.

When I think of the cards, the memory runs at the readings of my youth:

2013

The appreciation and empathy with what is observed is a matter of interpretation related to our own sensitivity and to the exercise of the eye accustomed to observe.

In essence, it is possible to perceive the human qualities that the article conveys without necessarily being an insider or a specialist. In the elaborate display of paper, the active and alive protagonist of the composition is not only to support the writing / painting; its structure, the fabric of the natural fibres, the absorbing ability, make it almost impossible to define beforehand the effects that the passage of the bristles of the brush and especially of colours, can create.The paper is a key part of the work, also physically, and everything that is not drawn to colour and pattern, it is the background, that does not mean absence, but silent note, solid break.

The works are designed in compound form where more essential elements are combined in a synthesis of volumes. They suggest a real objective convenience like the wooden container, and instrumental references like the reference to the tools for working with paper, or for printing.

Sometimes it does not matter what you “ write”: the winding path of a river is writing on the page of the earth, the vertical sections of a tree cut are writing on the wood, the entrapment of minerals in a rock are writing on the stone. As the clouds, for those who can read them, are fleeting writings in the sky and the roots of the trees of Angkor are messages between the stones, dances written with branches that tell of distant events. They are pluralities extended, corrugated, etched, man-made. This does not mean immobility, but a desire to expect what any place can, potentially, express if questioned.Then there's the music of the dance that leaves footprints assigned to a language and to abstract code of signs, capable of giving word to the flamboyant substance of the human soul: the visible gives meaning and depth to the invisible. Under the dynamic aspect, the application of colour, the writing, represent the diagram of a continuous dance.

Dance of the hand, dance of the fingers, dance of the arm. Symbolic dance that drags the body and the spirit that share the vital flow of the cosmos, to which the stops are unknown. The spirit of the artist lies not only in the past but it captures the new without losing the old. It is about assimilating the works of earlier times to our own conscience, because art can, or must, be in harmony with the spirit of its age.

To the viewer the task of making the necessary analyses and relevant summaries with the emotion and the awareness of being simultaneously with or without any instrument of interpretation.

Artists can express themselves through any means because there cannot be some paths allowed by the rules and some others forbidden by the same rules.

Poetry cannot be surrounded by that aura of wonder, as required by the romantic tradition in which we still live today. It can be something simple, caught along the path of ordinary life.

What matters is being able to pass onto the sheets that spirit and that emotion which are vehicles to the creative act. Every stroke, every character, are the expression of interiority and each gesture is the way to a route that flows from the mind to the body. It is the discipline of experience which does not aim towards theories and speculations, which are generally prerogative of convinced experts in times too lazy for cultural settlings.

If the means belong to traditions of the past, the methods used belong to the contemporary that rejects any rigid, artificial, symmetrical approach. However, the author reached the freedom of expression after long years of practice, dedication and teaching, studying alone, following the rules she has chosen, selective routes in which to learn the techniques and understand their meanings.

Nature likes the confidence that is assigned to it and therefore the artist takes nature as teacher of truth and beauty. Nature teaches for spiritual virtue that indicates the spirit of birth, of becoming, of fulfilment, of growth.

She chose a narrative that, in her intentions might lead to a thought not only aesthetic but analytical, mnemonic, projective, where

In this small exhibition space she thought she would give prominence to the elements responsible as transmitters of the constants, not just formal, which should suggest those meanings of which we often forget to understand the reasons. I think that abandoning the heritage of a civilization involves abandoning civilization itself. This does not mean that it is not possible to approach the different aspects from one's being and participate in multiple experiences, but this happens (as in the social integration) slowly and with awareness, not by co-optation and conveniences.

The interpretation is clear, left to the sensibility of those who create and those who observe and to that subtle and bursting breath of emotions that any work may be capable of arousing.

The handwriting of the sign and of the contemporary colour, where is not so important what “is written, “ leads to express exasperated signs in forms in which it can be difficult to read the meaning, but they can emit an aesthetic and communicative energy that can leave the viewer stunned or surprised, impressed with a swirl of emotions or by the emptiness of the mind.

The author creates works in response to the emotions felt by the readings of literary texts, of a poem, by the wonder of being a traveller and the by possibility to transform daily events into ceremonies and the daily functions of life regulated as a rite.

Ignazio Bellini

2011

Reflections and annotations for a crafty contribution

The ways in which the language of painting and of three-dimensional develops itself are based upon a conception of the natural elements as having a life of their own, therefore seen as subjects and not as objects or elements of support, even if that might seem their function.

The result of the research lies not only in what is seen, but on what is evoked, the uncertainty of the imagination and in giving possible meanings to reality. It is the happy result of an intuitive state of mind and can not, as such, be recognized if not intuitively. The three-dimensional structures and the designs are beautiful in and of themselves, any other meaning they can have is a marginal, though curious or interesting aspect.

The search for the meaning of simplicity and concentration is deliberate, to facilitate an understanding mostly intuitive and perceptive rather than only rational and logical.

Reasons that are seemingly abstract act as a catalyst for the mind, evoking other images which are present in nature with temporal characters and which are typical of the changing seasons for colour and materiality, both in floating arrangement of the branches, as an ingredient in a quiet garden:

space of differences, with camellias for the rigors of winter, azaleas, iris and wisteria in the spring, hydrangeas and lilies for summer, berries and sage for the autumn, when also the trees are changing mood and assume dark and sharp shades.

Asymmetric dislocations of shapes, the breakdowns, the use of empty spaces may appear arbitrary, but only if you believe that everything should be represented in its entirety, without imperfections and abnormalities. Even the dissonances are in a sense an expression of something.

The space not occupied, not painted, as well as the partial and fragmented views of the volumetric elements, are essential to the overall effect, like the most relevant parts and they serve to suggest links to relations and to introspective atmospheres. Surface and depth, inside and outside, between written and unwritten world, they can be configured as apparent antagonisms, but are not intended for probable separations, rather for the manifold charm of storytelling of complementary situations.

Narrating with traces which are relevant to the sign and to calligraphy, exercises of structure and of description for a language of things, omens of a world whose past could vanish in the transience of a communication without paper and ink.

The ramifications particularly twisted and marked by time, the seeds, the white mother of pearl, the filaments, contain complex messages and are full of sensations.

The leaves of gold, silver, the backgrounds of intense and soft materiality, the metals, the variety of forms, the smallest details are not designed for bright environments, where design and shapes appear in their peculiar entirety, but for places where the shadow lives with the shapes and it evokes their presence.

The two-dimensional veiling, the patinas, the worn metal and the reuse of disused forms suggest an atmosphere as if they were relics and fragments of ruins, fragments of a life, tangled plurality, natural erosion, where the wear and tear recall the melancholy feeling of transience, impermanence of things, but not the degradation, or the deterioration that accompanies the massification of consumption and serial productions.

In the discontinuity of the functions, forms combine parts of reality far apart, they are free association, synthesis of disparate elements, held together by an event and by the emotion it produces. The forms are only changed, as time changes us, but they still belong to us in another way, they only ceased to be what the first designer wanted them to be, to originate further metamorphosis into disjointed forms, traditionally recognized for other functions. The hues of the materials will become something else, undergoing the action exerted by time on the nature of the materials with soft opacity, marshy oxidations, vague luminescence, earthy burnishing. The configurations may become part of a known context, or make emerge vague reminiscences, reconstructing images suggested by allusions or cultural references.The past may be partly consistent with the present and in the appreciation of the sense of memory, in non-rhetorical terms, every form of meaning is always something that evokes memories. The shapes combine the past with the present and they appear as a multitude of different things though interrelated on many levels. To remember it is not just trivial recollection of a past event, since the transmission of memory in addition to guarding the event itself, returns it to a new life in the moment it is put back into the circle of the narrative.

The cards are chosen for the calligraphic compositions and for the traces of the inks, for the smooth or slightly absorbent surfaces, ideal for capturing the expressive and gestural nature of the brush. The designs are tight and well-tuned as polychrome enamels of the varnishes, the iridescent backgrounds disappear in the dissolved shades, releasing sometimes evanescent sparkles. The colours are mostly dark with shades of clay, ash grey, black inclusions, indigo, deep red, brown tea. Rolls-books are held in long horizontal stripes and in there live together indifferently the signs of the word with the traces of the brush. The pleasantness of the ink is preferred, the precise articulation of the elements from the refined three-dimensional materiality, the alternation of the abstract fluidity of the sign with the detailed annotation of short episodes. Wide and thin characters, dark and light, large and small, are still mingling, constantly changing in shape and size, in a constant combination between the signs of writing and the three-dimensional forms, where everything intersects and is transformed: things, places and environments in that restless combination and in the tangle of contradictions that are inherent in all of us. They are scenic installations, metaphorical mechanisms, embroidery of the imagination on the weft of the language and on the images of the form that intend to display the flow of experienced episodes. The band, made of bright tones and anecdotal captions, is marked by dislocations along the path of reading, with a route straight and smooth, with a hierarchy of primary shapes such as the circular rings, the squared areas, the vertical presences or the portal that welcomes and protects the small roller matrix marked by events and centrally located on a symbolic offertory. The colour is used to emphasize the shapes and outline the differences in volume, constituting at the same time the structural elements. The strips that pass between the horizontal rolls are supported by subtle cables that hold them up and that are marking their relations: they are lines and traces that connect points to force vectors. Others are suspended vertically between pinnacle rolls, slight and slender that mark the path and «the definition is not that on which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, is that from which something begins its presence». (Heidegger)

The band winds through a figure-vertical background and sharp stakes that mark the times and spaces of the narrative, and serve as supports for the relocation of a fragile bridge-cartouche, light and symbolic, almost thrown into the void. The figure- vertical background should be read as a guardian spirit that serves as a guideline; it is a fulcrum figure which suggests extensions in different directions and, at the same time, it is axis of the junction, crossroad and meeting place. Resting on the ground, it stands as a cape-tower flanked by islands with distinctive characteristics surmounted by stone-mountains. These are islands-appendices to give identity to a place seen from above and taken vertically from the center-point of oxidized iron and placed on the peak of the form-background.

The islands are elements that from a relatively unitary initial form come for differentiation to autonomous forms, distinct and yet, because of other bonds, hybridization cannot be prevented. The islands do not mean the abolition of the possibility of exchange, contact, even if they appear as forms in a vacuum, as pauses in the sound. Through a stream that brings other characters, the islands do not interrupt relationships, bonds, alliances. The islands, a bit like urban blocks, represent a mutual transition element. The Island as the Roman insula, is thus limited spatial meaning only in the surface but with extensions and branching relations.

Errant islands, which ancient legends described as being able to move.

Human islands in the sea of wandering and changing men.

Islands like raised platforms, they tend not to reduce, but to create contacts.

Even the arches are intended as part of that time where flows the harmony of colors and the harmony of forms, portals where different paths cross. They are different from each other because time does not flow in the same way for everyone and not always in the same direction. The stele, fixed vertically and bearing their loneliness, appear full of color and materiality as signs for the identification of silent places; they have their own formal vocabulary, are made with simple materials, searched and processed with precision, determination, craftsmanship and with the focus on how much and for how things can communicate even in the absence of the sound of the words.

Stations of a pilgrimage in which those who seek, find the direction of visionary travels and the sense of many readings. On the whole, complex and sophisticated structures emerge that show directly in the forms their purpose, their structure and they offer their own set of ideas and thoughts. They suggest events that are linked together with forms closely related to the images of portions of spaces, forms and signs that distinguish rarefied places as hypothetical urban settings, with the vocation to be a point of existential encounter. Viable places that can maintain their own identity even in the change in a mutable, enigmatic world.

Ignazio Bellini

2009

Rosi

Luisa Balicco

WORK ANNOTATIONS

THE WORD, THE SIGN, THE MATERIALS

When I used to paint, I used colors and the press, I printed vegetal microcosms where insects wandered, then in the paintings entered the human figure but only parts of it, fragments, traces, evocative oddments.

Evocative of what?

Of myths, of gods, of sacred places.

When I work I do an unconscious act of repechage; later I find out, when I rationalize the path, that forms and writings that often accompany the “ evocative forms” are pieces of ancient readings and images layered for a long time. The stimulus is almost always of a literary nature and those natural forms that always gather, are the element on which to aggregate faces, hands, words. The myth of the sacred trees has always marked my imagination and created the emotion of a sacred place, inviolable and terrible; so I constantly chased, trying to recreate, unique trees, magical symbols of the “ garden”.

The severed heads are works upon which I have meditated a lot, that of beheading, the head on the plate is a theme that has always excited me because I’ve always identified as the conquest of solitude for both the victim and the executioner. Over the years most of the work has been destroyed, dismantled parts reused in other compositions, it has always been a circular work, ephemeral in time, such as the use of materials that I prefer: yellowed papers, fabrics, roots, objects collected many years first, and that only at certain times, are combined by finding the words that go hand in hand with them.

The location and the choice of light are important, I prefer that around the “ evocative forms” there is darkness so that light creates scenographic atmospheres, I need to bind forms to their shadows on a continuum, the real branches and the shadow of the branches are parts of a whole. These objects are never alone but living in a dialoguing relationship, as harmonics sets.

Luisa Balicco – 2000

Branches consumed by the weather, found on the sea shore, polished stones and corroded by water by the friction with other stones, blades of grass that make up plots and bind themselves to the texts of Emily Dickinson, my inspiring teacher.

The ironic look of Emily Dickinson met with my thoughts; her poems, become my forms. The words become white shells. The deadwood become veins pulsing with the blood that beats at the extremities. The words are accepted and absorbed by painted cards, etched with wrinkles and stretched and then abandoned to the water or forgotten in the sun.The sentences find support in deadwood and snappy strips of corroded metals. The mythology enters with “sacred trees”, the olive tree of Apollo.

The garden of the Hesperides,the tree that holds the Golden Fleece, are suspended between heaven and earth, presences armed with teeth and irons, fortified against the rapacity, equipped for defense, keepers of valuable assets. The rocks on which the branches lean on or brush against, are either split by deep furrows, or smooth, or engraved by encrustations; on them have been applied or twisted metals. I sewed with infinite care even if sometimes clumsily, leaves on paper and canvas, I tried with materials that are consumed in time, to stop the fleeting moment, a feeling, a thought, the space suspended between myth and dream; I tried, in the suspension of the forms, to break away from the severity of what is real and without secrets, the known, all those forces that pull us down and keep us from fly.

Other trees have lost their defences, the trees with nests wrapped in misty foliage, but shiny and crossed by strips of words that creep into the foliage as arrows. These trees rise from basements or eggs or stones and have no contact with anything human, they do not hold mouths, they are not support to hands, they do not have phrases or words hanging from the branches, but they are evidence of an ancient harmony where tree, ground, stone, leaf, nest, are indissolubly united, inhabitants of a world where the human element has no space, and time is beating rhythms unknown to us. Not everything has to be explained, an area always remains unexplored, deliberately withheld, this is part of the job for each of us, “ the part only for ourselves”.

The drawings and reflections that accompanied step by step my work were support and clarification, sometimes have anticipated the work, other times they chased it, halting steps, doubts and certainties. I used the materials and colors with which I express myself better, the browns and precious colors, dear to the gods, and the glow of the metals, the softness of the colors of the forest and the dazzling colors of the icons.

Writing is the pleasure, the pleasure of writing and rewriting the same words, to stop thinking and find the right cadence. Remarkable was the discovery of metals, their ductility, the strong contrast created by approaching them to the natural forms to which they offer support.

Luisa Balicco – 2005

...my research becomes less and less representative, less and less copy outward; it is about memories, fragments, detached pieces of silence and solitude, fragments placed according to geometric patterns that go back to the light space of day, the harmonious flow of thoughts, places of remembrance, the meeting places...

Luisa Balicco – 2006