The exhibition ‘The gold of distance’ curated by Antonio Grulli opens on 5 May at the Brodbeck Foundation in via Gramignani 93 in Catania, open to the public until 7 July. “An exhibition of drawings. Drawings as places of question. Standing on the threshold of small sheets of paper and letting things seen or imagined pass by. In Francesco Balsamo’s drawings, full of details, there is no difference between seeing and imagining, just as darkness can shimmer and distance can be closeness – we read in a note from the exhibition – Metaphorical drawings are visions of Elsewhere, in the dense web of signs or in the clarity of a single continuous sign”.
“And around the sheets and between them, in this narrative and timeless horizon, almost a horizon behind the horizon, gold glimmers – he explains – Gold is a mystery, it is divine, but also earthly, it is the light that becomes matter, it is not color, it is pure matter, always ready to dematerialize before us. And if gold is a metaphysics of light, Balsamo’s drawings, especially the most layered and blackened ones, are a metaphysics of shadow”.
“The shadow – continues the note – that knows how to grasp time and summarize it in figures out of time, because those drawn by Francesco Balsamo are figures that do not belong to just one era. Some live in the 19th century, others belong to the 30s or 50s of the twentieth century, but all live on enigmas and visions. If the past time is condensed in the small format drawings, in the line drawings, in the more fragile ones, arranged inside a row of display cases, in their almost transparent signs, the most fleeting time is outlined, the present time. But the present time has already passed, and so the drawing is a memory of things piled up outside of time, of fragments scattered in a limited space, in an unknown entrusted to a pencil or traced with a golden sign”.
The exhibition is part of the activities reported by Societas Siciliae, a community project that involves a group made up of various Sicilian artists, gallery owners, collectors, curators, associations, foundations and museums. A constellation that in various ways contributes to contemporary Sicilian artistic production and its valorization in the world.
