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Artist: Claudio Ballestracci ( Italy, 1965 - present )
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Main Category: Sculpture
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Genres: Contemporary European Art
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Biography: THE PERILOUS THRESHOLD BETWEEN THE WORLDS
The experience of dream discloses to every human being the faint border between the visible world and the invisible one. And it is there, on the threshold, where times swing and the diurnal experience becomes allegory and metaphor: it is there, where the mystics’ paths unfold and the lymph which inspire poets and artists flows. The poetic of Claudio Ballestracci has deeply experienced these borderline messages: oneiric voices have leaded him through the choice and the transformation of everyday materials – which belong to this earthly (too earthly) world. Claudio uses as supports of his artworks handmade which cannot be defined as vulgar – as, i.e., copper pipes or fabrics – but, all the same, are made obtuse, dull and unpoetical by the industry and by an inferior sense of habit. Rather, the richness of the meaning which springs from his artworks is generated by the alchemic symbiosis of the items he produces with natural elements and composts: sand, stones, fire, water, goldfishes: as if he wanted to re-write an implicit genealogy, or theogony, of the cosmos and its archetypical, primal potentialities which unfold themselves in the vision.
The artist, thus, pushes on the already-seen, the already-known, not to make it unrecognisable, but – rather – to return it the fascinating and disquieting transparency of the symbol. And Claudio’s symbols seem to capture – through the material he uses – the evocative message that is impressed on them right on the threshold of the two worlds.
His small copper beds, re-propose the theme of infantile (and therefore primal) uneasiness: they recall us the hallucination of a trip, bestriding a couch. Also, this is not a path made of usual horizons: it is, rather, undertaken in a vertical direction, towards the sky. Thus, the beds’ legs are vertiginously long, and similar to incense spirals. These dry and decreased couches stretch themselves out towards the celestial world, like the ascetic saints of the Icons or the hermits in the Counter-Reformation’s paintings. The aim is to reach the threshold to have a look on the other side, through a mystery hunting. From this creative desire spring the “aquatic pillowcases” of Claudio: tiny aquariums of fabric, suspended on trestles, “impregnated wombs and placentae”, because in them the swimming goldfish is the captured memory of the invisible and it is, therefore, the metaphor born.
Alessandro Giovanardi
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