Davide Balliano | Cardi Gallery
This is the first show in the UK of this Italian painter, who specialises in “geometric abstraction”. Balliano originally studied photography, and there’s a suggestion of photo negatives in these new works: glitchily repeated loops and curves, picked out on linen canvases with a mixture of gesso, resin and plaster.
Balliano’s loops suggest circuitry, pipework, something man-made, machine-like. They’re architectural and monolithic. But the loops are never perfect and nor are the surfaces of his canvases. He composes in Photoshop, then makes a technical drawing, then executes the final work by hand.
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The patterns themselves, the machine-like loops, are produced by reduction: he scrapes off layers of plaster. Looked at closely, and the effortful intervention is obvious: the canvases are scored by minor abrasions, scratches. The plaster drips and streaks. The lines don’t quite line up.
Cardi is one of London’s least friendly gallery spaces, from its sticky front door, to the dour gallerists, to the harsh overhead electric lighting and cheap flooring; an intriguing contrast with the largeness of the space, and its location on such an apparently plush street in Mayfair.
All these contrasts really lent something to the staging of these works. I can’t imagine these uncompromising binaries of colour and form under more sympathetic lighting, or against anything other than bare white walls.
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While the artist now lives in the US, he grew up in Turin, a city associated with industrial production. This seems a natural fit with the picked-out pipework, the circuitry, I see in the canvases. But, in fact, he looks further into the past “It’s a process of excavation,” Balliano says. “As many Italians, I grew up surrounded by ruins.
“I’ve always loved how ruins don’t have any function any more other than making us think of the passing of time. The circular lives of societies. I always felt that I would have like to put that in my paintings.”
Davide Balliano is at Cardi Gallery (London). 08 October - 14 December 2024