ART
By Maximillien de Lafayette
vincenzo
balsamo
Vincenzo Balsamo, The
Italian Legend: Between Art Eternity And Human Immortality!! Elected
International Artist of the Year 2004
By
Maximillien de Lafayette, WACJ Art Historian & Senior Art Critic
Never
before and never again, will there be a woman like Marie Curie and Cleopatra,
a painter like da Vinci and Raphael, a genius like Thomas Edison or Albert
Einstein , a visionary like Picasso, a poet like Victor Hugo, Lamartine, or
Dante, a general like Alexander the Great and Hannibal, a composer like Mozart
and Chopin, a singer like Caruso, Carlos Gardel and Jacques Brel and an artist
like Vincenzo Balsamo!!
Vincenzo Balsamo, the last greatest artist of the 20th
and 21st centuries!! The Art of Balsamo is immortal!! All the
greatest artists are gone; Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian,
Utrillo, Monet, Pissaro…They’re gone. Only one remains and you are looking at
him. BALSAMO! I admire this
man and consider him as the greatest living artist. Am I biased? Absolutely
not, even If I do love him like a brother.
An Italian living legend, with an unsurpassed creativity and a heart bigger
than the world we live in. Maestro Balsamo lives a quiet life in Verona, a
beautiful romantic Italian city so dear to the hearts of French poets and
singers, lovers and to millions of tourists around the globe.
THE HARD AND PAINFUL YEARS:
Vincenzo Balsamo was
born on the 27th of June, 1935 in Brindisi, Italy. A great day and a great
event for Italia and the world of art. In 1946, Balsamo, the second of seven
children, at the age of eleven, loses his father, a sailor who had a great
appetite for life. This tragic event plunges the family into economic ruin
forcing the young Balsamo to abandon his studies and to take on any job to
feed the family. Apparently, he found a pleasant and a challenging artistic
job as an assistant to the painter and decorator Pietro Acquaviva. Balsamo
began to work all kinds of jobs at Acquaviva’s studio. Through and thanks to
his work at the studio, the young apprentice Balsamo met churches rectors and
priests who needed a helping hand in restoring and retouching some religious
artworks and paintings in their aging centers of worships, cathedrals and
churches.
Still
life, 1968
Thus, the maestro and his student had a great
entrance to the deteriorated but magnificent religious artwork of the village
churches.
Certainly, working on
old paintings by Italian masters from past centuries gave the young Balsamo a
rare opportunity to come closer and closer to the soul, techniques and mastery
of past maestri of the finest Italian art. And this take me personally to what
the French Emperor Napoleon once said; During the Egypt campaign, Napoleon
Bonaparte stood on his white horse and shouted at his army while he was
pointing his finger at the top of the pyramids: “French soldiers, look at the
Pyramids, 4000 years of history are looking upon you! Do not disappoint
history, Victory!” Balsamo had identical experience. He was working on and
retouching the masterpieces of the great era of Italia!! But, certainly no big
money was coming. The priests and the half ruined churches were as broke as
Balsamo himself!!
No doubt, this new challenging assignment allowed the young
Balsamo to gain a deep feeling and gradually a strong understanding of the
techniques and styles of the old masters, differentiating between primary and
secondary colors, discovering pictorial media, analyzing pigments and
measuring time, space and the life of the paintings between…..This
self-discovery and perseverance will one day play a major role in the future
career of the young Balsamo. This is how, Balsamo came to learn about
painting, how to elegantly and romantically flirt with colors, how to sail
into the soul and eloquent silence of masterpieces which he unveiled their
beauty and converse with. Balsamo thus, became the messenger of the past great
Italian masters to the modern world and the go go between the majestic
painting era of Italia and our troubled world. Meanwhile, maestro Acquaviva
kept on feeding and nourishing the artistic appetite of his ardent student.
View
of Brindisi in Italy, where Balsamo was born.