Sicilian artist Francesco Balsamo (Catania, 1969) exhibits his last series of works, realised with different techniques on board and canvas: they testify to the significant psychological and existential elements underlying his research, which are strictly intertwined with his marked inclination for poetry and literature.
Through an investigation into the language, regardless of whether it is verbal or visual (in this sense, the titles of his works are evocative), the artist catches a deaf mankind beyond the anonymous and depersonalised characters of sleepless and moody people, of orphans and soldiers; a mankind wakefully waiting for something that will come, but independently of individual will. Therefore, these works are permeated by an undefined, motionless time, which only art can capture and materialise into an image.
The exhibition is titled “The Deaf Peace”, and it is the artist himself who clarifies his intentions, claiming that: “The concept of peace as “absence of turmoil”, in a psychological sense, is the acceptation of the term I am most interested in: a state of calmness and quietness, but, again, a deaf one. Immune to time, as it is out of time. Imperturbable, as only painted figures can be. The deaf peace is almost a “paradox”, an oxymoron which is supposed to express the ambiguous nature of any image – especially of a drawn or painted one”.
Sleepless and moody people, orphans and soldiers should be regarded as figures of wakefulness, belonging to a borderline condition…