Dario Ballantini
Italy
foto portret Dario Ballantini door ®Pietro Cruciatti
Ballantini shows his creativity since his early apprenticeship in Livorno, and grinds it down during his feverish nights' work on canvases, summoning all the shades of the avant-garde's (Cubo-Futurism, the Metaphysical Movement, Surrealism and wild Expressionism, above all).
He attacks with acrylics or pastels his paintings and adds a modern twist to the era of obsession and desolation by taking inspiration from Sironi's suburban leaden factories, contrasting with the arrogance of a face's haunted expression, lit up by the vulgar underling of a smile or the sneer of a mask. He dismembers a body in the sprawl of houses that spills onto the stage, as if driven by some geological disaster, some movement of the earth that transforms objects and thoughts, under the pull of a metamorphic drift of ever-changing images and ideas.
The busy splintering of the human figures and objects recalls the Futurist tradition with its Cubist influence; certain perspective out of Sironi and De Chirico suggests a metaphysical atmosphere of unease; and in comparison the transition to Surrealism is decreed by the amalgamation of certain compositions in which thoughts, nightmares and dreams materialize and encounter elements reality.