Relating with Balestra before restoration (Sedimentation #4)

ENCOUNTERING THE BALESTRA MADONNA BEFORE THE RESTORATION
The painting of the Madonna by the eighteenth-century Veronese artist Antonio Balestra always hung above my mother’s bed and consequently in front of my eyes for many years. It is now the subject of comparison for a new painting of mine. This is the painting that I knew and encountered for all those years, whose colours that had deteriorated and yellowed over time. My painting is the result of working with these colours as they are today. And it is only after having crystallised it in this way that I will have it restored. The Balestra “Madonna” has become the propulsive force of one of my paintings. Its palette pushed mine towards these pinks, oranges, browns, petrol greens and blues. The colours that were separate in my mother’s painting are mixed in mine. The final work, a diptych, consists of my “Sedimentation” and the photographic reproduction of Balestra’s painting.

Relating
This series of pictures regards all of those paintings which sprang from an external request. They thus derive from having come into contact with the mood of someone else’s palette and of having displayed the chromatic impressions one layer on top of the other or placed alongside one of my pre-existing paintings. Usually it is a question of having related to another artist’s painting, but what also occasionally happens is that I compare myself with another language, for example a literary one, or that I am inspired by a city. This series of paintings can also spring from a form of commissioning, in other words the work I am weighing myself up against can be determined by someone else.

Painting
Opere pittoriche a olio o acrilico su diversi supporti, ma prevalentemente su tela