Reviews
“Imagination is a tree.
It has the virtues of integration like those of the tree.
Imagination is both roots and branches.
It lives between heaven and earth.
It lives in the land and in the wind”
Gaston Bachelard
Combining the double thread of individual memory and the historical one, of imagination and of mythical truth, Luisa Balicco, presented her works as enchantments, jardins extraordinaires, sanctuaries, citadels untouched, sort of hortus conclusus where trees and words, shades and shimmers, clouds and thoughts, fantastic creatures and mysterious sounds harbour discretely in assemblages unheard of: a poetics of the accumulation, stratification, accrochage, in which the different fragments act as catalysts of sense and build maps to go across the labyrinths of memory.
Foreign and external to the common places and the disputes of contemporary art, these works highlight the challenge of a grammar “other”, a mysterious and timeless language where nature and artifice, stone and metal, leaf and writing, celebrate the daily resurrection of the wonderful, unexpected and surprising. A strongly autobiographical work, introspective and memorial, which speaks of the self and of the truths hidden by the figures and archetypes most frequently crossed and interrogated by the artist in her recurring meetings with poets, writers, musicians, and most loved painters: Dickinson, Calvino, Mishima, Tanizachi, Klimt, Utamaro, the Greek tragedians, the Torah, Kerenyi, Colli, Jung, Calasso, etc. The exhibition, the first personal one by Luisa Balicco in a public exhibition space, consists of two distinct sections, although in intimate relationship between them, called the Sacred Grove and the Precincts of the Nymphs. In the first section, a series of sculptures-tree, formed by surprising hybridization of roots and bands, gears and stones, branches and wires of gold, metal and vegetable forms, evokes the memory of ancient and futuristic rituals, of tales lost or yet to be invented, of sagas and mythical legends bloomed in those Greek woods dear to Apollo and Artemis, and in those woods of the Gaul where the Druids met the Gods and officiated the cults, and in others more distant woods at the Gates of Orion. To the trees, which, with their verticality unite heaven and earth, the sacred and the profane, the visible to the invisible, men have always asked for protection and comfort, lighting and advice, as demonstrated by figures of great symbolic significance such as the Tree of life, the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Good and Evil, the Tree of the Kabbalah, the Cosmic Tree or Axis Mundi that “grows in a round fashion, giving slowly to its own being, the form that eliminates the fickleness of the wind” (Rainer Maria Rilke). In archaic times the sacred places represented the cosmos in miniature, and were made of trees, rocks and water, or of a sacred enclosure which contained an altar, a stone and a tree as we can still find in India, and quite similar to the one from which the Buddha sat sacrificing His individual self and achieving enlightenment. The section The Gardens of the Nymphs, combines the artist's preference for the garden, a place of miraculous intersections between nature and culture, between contemplation and meditation, and the ever-watchful attraction to female mythical creatures: the nymphs in this case (from the ancient Greek “young girl”), fascinating and dangerous, elusive and fleeting, barely glimpsed between the silvery reflections of the river and the dark foliage of the forest. In the valuable series of paintings presented here for the first time the enchanted figure of this flashing and arcane world is evoked by combining and overlapping leaves of gold, very thin layers of paper, rice paper, coloured glazes in sophisticated shades of the purples, greens, blues and oranges. The result, beyond the abstract and formless culture references and homages to the artistic tradition of the Eastern (from Byzantium to Japan), is a skilful weaving of lights and sounds, scents and reflections that allude both to the undergrowth, wet of rain, and to the flowers macerated from the water, as well as to the light of the moon that is dear to the nymphs.
Enrico De Pascale – ph. Federico Buscarino
Sculptures and hidden messages
A temporary shop devoted to art.
Paintings, installations, papers, books and mysterious gardens.
“The Rocky Garden. A large island of metal, smooth and articulate, the garden is double, sculpted rocks and hairy parts from the cracks, go out or come in, red roots.”
While Luisa Balicco describes her work on the gardens, other gardens and other worlds open in my mind; the first of them all is ideally inhabited by that great artist by the name of Louise Nevelson.
Ukrainian naturalized American, she was born in 1904 and known worldwide for her abstract - expressionist work, for her “coffers” regrouping objects abandoned and juxtaposed, to form new creations. Nevelson used every day things discarded from use to give them a new life through her assemblages, totemic works full of signs and iconographic references, unknown to most of her contemporaries and yet today recognized and valued as great works of art.
She used to say: “When you put together things that other people have thrown away, you're really giving life... a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created”.
This idea also underlies the production of Luisa Balicco that looks at her gardens and speaks with her eyes in the same way as Nevelson says that “the garden is divided in two by a sword that separates it, and then out of an island of stars is a lunar observatory. The door stands high and unviolated and the shadow of the ancestor is safe sentry”.
I think it's strange that something akin to a man inhabits the space inaccessible and so hostile of that garden.
Alessandra Corti – ph. Federico Buscarino
Tri-dimensions, painting, arrangements, papers
Personal exhibition of Balicco Luisa - Provincia e Mostre, May 2011
For the first time in Bergamo a temporary shop becomes a space where to enjoy art.
“The Rocky Garden. A large island of metal, smooth and articulate, the garden is double, sculpted rocks and hairy parts from the cracks, go out or come in, red roots.”
While Luisa Balicco describes her work on the gardens, other gardens and other worlds open in my mind; the first of them all is ideally inhabited by that great artist by the name of Louise Nevelson.
Ukrainian naturalized American, she was born in 1904 and known worldwide for her abstract - expressionist work, for her “coffers” regrouping objects abandoned and juxtaposed, to form new creations. Nevelson used every day things discarded from use to give them a new life through her assemblages, totemic works full of signs and iconographic references, unknown to most of her contemporaries and yet today recognized and valued as great works of art.
She used to say: “When you put together things that other people have thrown away, you're really giving life... a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created”.
This idea also underlies the production of Luisa Balicco that looks at her gardens and speaks with her eyes in the same way as Nevelson says that “the garden is divided in two by a sword that separates it, and then out of an island of stars is a lunar observatory. The door stands high and unviolated and the shadow of the ancestor is safe sentry”.
I think it's strange that something akin to a man inhabits the space inaccessible and so hostile of that garden.
ph. Eugenio Buccherato
Luisa Balicco (Bergamo 1946)
Working for several years on the local and national artistic scene, Luisa Balicco (Bergamo 1946) is an eccentric personality and as such, hard to classify. Her works, conceived as a synthesis of painting, graphics and art of installation, bear witness to a variety of interests ranging from literature to music, from poetry to history of arts.
Cultured and tireless traveller, she has developed a very personal expressive language in which figures and archetypal forms of nature are interwoven with painting and writing, the latter used in the double function of sign and meaning, memory storage and prophecy.
Her work, irresistibly linked to the world of books and the written page, creates a poetic of accumulation, stratification, accrochage, in which the different fragments (paper, textiles, gold leaf, leaves, concretions, etc.) create fascinating and mysterious labyrinths, gardens, maps for the journeys of the mind.
The creations of Luisa Balicco magnify in the most unexpected and surprising ways the transmuting properties of paper, which the artist since always manipulates and transforms as her above-all privileged expressive medium.
From very light papers to heavy sheets of rice paper, from wrapping paper and wallpaper to sheets of papyrus and worn papers in which you wrap the food, there is no paper material that Luisa Balicco has not experimented with, combined in layers , glued and pressed, now crumpled, torn, reduced to thin strips.
Her first encounter with the cellulose pulp and its processing techniques took place a few years ago in the laboratory of Bologna “The navile” of Renata Giannelli, among tanks filled with soft “mush” with colors of all kinds, which communicated to her an unusual pleasure, both physical and intellectual. In such place Luisa began to produce a very personal diary, incorporating into the cellulose pulp the most disparate materials, related to her imagination and her experience as a woman, intellectual, artist and teacher.
In the thin architecture of the sheets she then created cuts and cracks, thus revealing new aspects and new fragments, pieces of a speech uninterrupted. Some of these sheets were hung like clothes on hangers or like banners from the top of slender towers. Some others formed large and small books, slain by the words and colors, by whispers and glares, always emphasizing the extraordinary quality of the material, with its load of rebellious and unpredictable folds, bubbles and ripples, bulges, bumps and craters, from the depth of which other worlds peeped, with the promise of more and more surprises.
The magical sense of this flashing and mysterious world is evoked by combining and overlaying sediments, fields of colour in the most popular shades: purples, reds, blacks. The result is a skilful weaving of lights, sounds and reflections that are the portrait of the artist herself, her analogic self in expressive and formal terms. The recent artist's books are configured through complex reading stands, designed and manufactured ad hoc by expert and wise hands.
These are not just simple supports but integral parts of the work, that if on the one hand embellish it with their plastic and spatial qualities, on the other hand suggest to the viewer-reader-explorer new interpretations and further ways of fruition. Strangers to platitudes and disputes of contemporary art, her works thematize the challenge of a language “other”, arcane and with different timings, where nature and artifice celebrate the daily appearance of the wonderful, the unexpected, the surprising.
A strongly autobiographical and introspective work that testifies to the intellectual and creative paths made by the artist over the years (she held the chair of Painting Disciplines in the Art School of Bergamo from 1970 to 2005).
Enrico De Pascale – ph. Federico Buscarino
“Only to vent the heart”
The garden-islands by Luisa Balicco
Set up in a temporary shop in the city, the latest exhibition by Luisa Balicco presented itself as a constellation of satellite works scattered in space, a cluster of figures and complex signs that invited the viewer to transmigrate from one work to another following subtle but irresistible trajectories. Conceived in stations, with distinct but closely interrelated plastic cores, the exhibition lined up a dozen works distributed along the walls, in the middle of the room, in the space of the window that faces the street, according to a model of “mobile” fruition where each work was both independent and part of a whole, separated but closely related to the others.
Raised on slender metal rods, the works stood in space talking at a distance, hinting at a body of work-islands, at a structure which was at the same time open and closed like an archipelago.
To accentuate this impression was the actual appearance of part of the works, like atolls lying on platforms of glass in which natural elements, taken directly from reality (stones, shells, branches, roots, leaves, feathers, fruits and dried flowers etc.), conversed and intertwined with enigmatic and mysterious figures - sort of stele, flags, domes, portals, matrices, pinnacles - made of copper, bronze, silver, gold, bone, wood, stone. The sophisticated blend of real forms and created forms, natural and man-made (moulded, embossed, turned) represents since the beginning the modus operandi of the artist, whose investigation is directed to the construction of fantastic micro worlds mixing not only heterogeneous materials (vegetable and mineral, metal and paper, glass and feathers) but also different techniques (painting, sculpture, drawing, writing, installations).
Completely unrelated to the disputes of contemporary art such works thematize the challenge of a language “other” mysterious and timeless, where natural products and artefacts, shells and designs, create accrochages never seen before, which are reflected only in some literature of the fantastic, in mythological tales, in mannerist eccentricities, in surrealist poetry or graphics. Read more...
Enrico De Pascale – ph. Sara Luraschi
To Luisa and Rosi
Preface to the book “ Ties -Tie Me” by Rosangela Pesenti
Writes a Spanish poet of the '500, F. de Quevedo, “Dust I am, but dust in love”
And so writes Lella Ravasi who mentioned him in her book ( 1 )
“It is thanks to very strong presence of love that we can enter into life, it is for a strong presence of love that we can get out of it; we break our head on how to leave behind a memory”.
In this mystery is the relationship with the mother.Luisa tells the relationship with her mother in the intense light of the red lacquer and of the gold, a light that seems to illuminate an autumn midday in the shadows of indecipherable colours, a variety of pigments and materials as soft as velvet, which offer their caress to the descent in the dark of the soul along the unforeseen interior stairs of each one of us.
Light and shadow of a bodily combat continuously asymmetric until the end, when the difference becomes familiarity and then just quiet confidence.
We celebrate a secular ritual of life and death, which we divided in words but which remain united in the feeling that we all have about ourselves, in that knowledge of the body that accompanies us and saves us in the uninterrupted change of physicality around the nagging thoughts. We come mysteriously from the womb of a mother who becomes the receptacle of the mixture of different stories and far along the path of a species that retains fleeting memories of the origins and we go toward a ceaseless transformation that we can tell only by approximations until the last impossibility. Luisa with her works is a storyteller of love, of that timeless mystery that gives us to time, not just human time, but to the time at the depths of life, which is stone and tree and wing beat, whisper, kaleidoscope , rustle of stars. Here, next to the words of her mother Rosi, Luisa quiets her expressive ghosts in the small size of a notebook in which she accompanies with vibrations of light and hot shade the uncertain handwriting of Rosi, and gives us back the meaning of a separation that becomes fulfilment. A notebook fits the space between the hands and the eyes, it is like a door that can be opened and closed continuously. Whoever opens this book knows to be close to the word and immersed in the silence: basic, clean, chaste are the loving words of Rosi in which we can recognize ourselves, for that love that anyone can find within themselves for a city or a child; in the dense colour that Luisa marks with her confident stroke we are surrounded by silence, as in an enchanted garden, where listening to the limit of loved days does not become despair, and waiting for the darkness becomes that exercise of patience that was at the origin of all writing and still calls us to the risk of thinking and living by finding the pace best suited to our being. There is a legacy that is passed only through the whole pain of separation, a knowledge that can only be received and exchanged in the awareness that the value of human relations is in the proximity. Where the bodies are re-known, word and colour that they give us are witness to the unspeakable, bonds that attract us because they reassure us of the possibility of the journey.
A legacy for Luisa and a wish for each of us, in the words of her mother.
(1) Silvia Lagorio, Lella Ravasi, Silvia Vegetti Finzi - If we are the earth (Se noi siamo la terra). Il Saggiatore 1996
To Luisa and Ignazio
By Rosella Morri
I'm often with Luisa and Ezio, in important trips or simple walks. On those occasions I could watch them now to dwell on a stone, now on a branch or a trunk; I observe what in their curious and sympathetic eyes already had its reason and its location. My generation, just next to them, ended the period of the patient research of Le Corbusier and of the artists of the twentieth century.
And from that season we all projected ourselves into impatient research. Everything was suddenly Post and everything had to declare its novelty and its temporariness. But times change, and now many have returned to the patience of the ancient, the oldest ones: pickers, weavers, craftsmen of gold, iron and bone.
And so I was able to assist with pleased surprise to the myth that comes back, that myth is the story of us, of our deepest and most secret part. Myth, patient extraction of an ancient wisdom of colours textures and materials. The myth of doing. Professor Sini says that art is what is not inert, what does not stand still, what “ dance”, what has rhythm. This is what I have witnessed during these long months of work and research: what we see is the dance of the one into the other than self. Their house is slowly becoming the forge of Ephesus and the threshing floor of Psyche separating the bran from the wheat. The ancient ritual that is expressed in gestures repeated with patience and silence, a concrete form of an intimate conversation.
The male element becomes the support and completion of a web of female meanings from which it cannot separate. In this exhibition we see the unity of thought which is expressed in the difference.
