Fleeting Sunsets - Light Crystals and Water Dawns in Gianni Balzanella's art

Gianni Balzanella's impressionist interest characterizes his pictorial art in which details are evocative, allusive as well as visibly clear. The essence of the landscape never appears so decorative, but more chromatic and crossed by light at a precise moment. The silent light continually changes, each moment differs from each other and every instant offers a different vision from the following one: the constant flow becomes the central point of the present study. The artist does not, however, allude to the ideal construction of reality being careful of the instant feeling which comes up suddenly evoking pathos and strong emotions. Furthermore, the artist is also attracted by the Sea Storms painted with quick brush strokes, rich in various and deep blue, sky blue and green shades crossing the canvas depicting crinkled and swirling waves that break on the shore. Balzanella is directly inspired by Claude Monet's stormy seas in the region of Normandy, as well as the impetuous and powerful waves painted by Paul Gauguin and the colourful and realistic Mediterranean Sea at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. The study of the movement of water is carefully analyzed through a constant investigation on the resulting intense and bright gleams of light and dawns pierced by light rays and brilliant colourful flames. Seas, rivers and lagoons become diaphanous and alabaster surfaces where the transparencies compete with innumerable reflexes on which the artist seems, magically, to block time encapsulating it forever in a chromatic bundle of rays and vibrations. Plays of light in St Mark's Basin are, moreover, a recurrent and suggestive creative inspiration to modulate the colour and the brightness of the breezes dissolved in various graduated shadings expressing the fusion between Venice and the sea. Balzanella misleads the apparent barriers playing with the mirror-like reflection of waves and earthly elements being fleeting and confused feeling a rising sense of peace expressed in the painted Rialto Bridge or the light dance of the canal boats. The lagoon forms here dissolve themselves in the rarefied chromatic characteristics explaining a fleeting, fluid and magical reality that also fascinated William Turner and Vasilij Kandinskij. The artist, however, showing the same interest in storms or views of snow-capped peaks with skaters of Pieter Bruegel the Old, portrays solitary and silent landscapes where white penetrates into the things in very bright shades of blue. The importance of suspended storm conditions, the lack of thunders, the origin of new forms and eccentric profiles, (re)drawn by the candid mantle of snow, has always inspired poets and artists in a succession of profoundly graceful images: Pascoli preached the value of peace and innocence, Carducci highlighted the importance of memory, Saba imagined the snow like angel wings to embellish the bare and arid winter landscapes defining it 'blooming'. Besides, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley painted scenes of great grandeur - clear skies, solitary figures moving at a slower pace in silvered landscapes where the silent trails reflect the stagnant life and time cycle - that, nevertheless, tell of travellers, itineraries, what has been done and will be done again. An amazing and bizarre snow-white monochromatic universe that, inspired by Giuseppe De Nittis, shows a mysterious connection between perfection and chaos manifested through the perfect symmetry of the snow crystal coming from a storm. In conclusion, Gianni Balzanella investigates the concept of beauty formulating contradictions: life and time are in a constant state of flow trying to catch a unique and irripetible instant and immobilize it forever on the canvas.
Prof. Antonella Nigro