"Fluctuate between extreme," writes Novalis, "that is necessary unite and divide. From this bright point of the fluctuation each reality springs - there is contained all - object and subject are for its, and not it for they. The dimension of the self, or the imaginative power, the fluctuate - determines causes the extreme, between which the fluctuation happens. out of this circle something is of absolutely real, since the fluctuate, his origin, it is font, the mother, of all the reality, the same reality."

         In fact without division there is not union, and is the "contact" that it establishes division and union to the same time. The artist, when he is such, he personify this polarity, in as union of the heterogeneous, fluctuation and play of extreme feelings and extreme tensions. Therefore the bright point of the fluctuation becomes the discovery of a new world: the world in which acts the "intellectual imagination," a fantastic intellect, that is the resumption of the poetic strength of the imagination in movement, a marvellous sense that could gather all the senses, and is through all this that we perceive that the visible is attached to the invisible, the sensitive instead to what could not be felt.

         Vincenzo Balsamo - in this exhibition prepared to the Chiostri of Santa Caterina, Oratorio de' Disciplinanti in Finale Ligure - he present a series of twenty-six works to oil, that they belong to the complete five years of job and of search, and a series of jobs on paper, prevalently watercolor, that they go from the 1980 to today.

         Enough approach to the oils, or to the papers, for understand that the awareness of the own possibility doesn't prevent to Balsamo of absorb some influences, especially deriving from the Impressionism, from the Divisionism (Pellizza and Segantini), from the Cubism (Picasso and Braque) from Mirò, from Klee, from Tobey, from Kandinsky, from Gorky, from Twombly. Like these his models Balsamo looks for a new internal universe, often with a minute rigor and almost scientific, a new formal theory of the elements of the sketch, whose base, but, it is tied up always to the same concept of spiritual and irrational unity. In fact the modern art could bear only - told Kandinsky - where the signs become symbols. The line and the color are in these jobs detached from each explanatory and utilitarian intent, and transferred in the kingdom of the not related, they are successful to the rank of autonomous expressive essences, in which are not eliminated, deliberately, each organic continuity between the feeling and the symbol that expresses it, that they have roots in his individual psyche.

         The graphic automatism of the Surrealism, purified from useless psychologism of manner, is certainly an important component of the work of Balsamo: whose sign-image is the direct transcript of an inside dynamism, the visible and indelible trace, that the existence, do it, leaves in the world.

         The Surrealism however moves from a premise of an objective separation and of a big antagonism between the universe of the aware and of the unconscious, and of this last postulated the liberty and the authenticity that they reveal themselves in the dream. What instead Balsamo refuses of the Surrealism, it is a false phenomenon, that show a thing and means an other of it. The more amazing appearance than these images-sign is of exist concretely in the space and in the time without he be, in oneself, neither spatial neither storm, as like the existence "it fluctuate" in the space and in the time, without need of set problems of where it is placed. These signs and these colors allude to a cosmic reality in continuous movement, to a get excited of tensions, of current of strength, in a world for ever in formation, and therefore not determined, neither determinable in the fixity of the belongingses, like wanted Novalis.

         Balsamo looks for as a dimension infinitely wide and animate of the reality: that of the formal embryos, of the energies that precede the constitute of the subject, of the strengths that extend to become forms, of the indistinct that however nothing doesn't have of confused, of dark, of dangerous, because it refers to the genetic phase, elementary, therefore more authentic and vital, of the reality. This world, in continuous ferment, of his images-sign find an equivalent also in the fabulous prehistoric figurations and protohistorical, of the primitive people, and sometimes, of the children, analogies that go however circumscribed in the limits of a magic attitude in front of the reality.

         Balsamo doesn't think about the historical birth of the world, but to the his continuous revived, in the existence of all days long.

         The place where the image-sign resolves, in all his linear concreteness and colourist, it is undoubtedly the place of the indistinct, of the bright fluctuation, but also of the identity psycho- physical, what we are usual call the place of the instincts. It stays however always from explain what it is this magic place, this extraordinarily rich humus of humors and incredibly fertile of images, that we call instinct. For the our artist is not certainly human subject to the raw state, but a compact agglomeration of remote experiences sedimented and soaked from the time. Something of those defeats and distant experiences reveal themselves in this writing-painting, that sometimes leaves to catch a glimpse, like to the microscope, organic residues, traces of peaches, of bugs, of grasses, of which is composed the they ancient mix.

         In that dense humus of images in power, the same origin of our sensibility stays, of our ability of feel the imprints of the world, and of transform it in something of human. In the existential total of space and time the "I" of the author stretches, without find barriers, and like by now all we, he completes a march toward the nothing, but occupy the nothing, will fill it, it means annul it like nothing, and annul the nothing it means give existence to the belongingses, weave and weave again, obsessive, the organic fabric. If the image-sign of Balsamo organizes and reveals the deep and vital layers of the existence, his painting and his graphics begins to naked, and they sensitize, the neuralgic centers of the perception, and not in the sense of condition them to a scheme, but, to the contrary, in the sense of offer naked to the experience, that nothing of his lightness, the more alive part and alarmed of our being, doesn't lose is psychic that physical. Drawn aside therefore of a painting "pictographic," in as doesn't gather the content of acquaintance closed in the glove of the word, like in the Chinese writing, but his appearance phenomenal, his being plays and figure.

         The work of Balsamo is tied up to situations where, like in the informal, the reality reveals his absence, without hierarchies between human and not-human, therefore everything comes run in the same organic chaos, characteristic from an obsessive repetition. They in the Seventy-Eighty years are noticed a series of taking of position of the artists in favor of the autonomy of the work and of the ineffability of the art against the experimentation to all the costs of any. Has been arrived therefore to tell all and the contrary of all. The XX century has stayed a century romantic, tied up to the problems of the psyche, and it has contemplated in substance to do his an ideology of the power, typical of the enlightenment period: or like make aesthetics the vision of the reality, like give her body: it is an assignment undoubtedly difficult, from "initiated," and, like told Novalis, able to being needs get on the throne, because the world must extend to a perpetual revolution, even in the form of an autosuggestion. The magic-artistic use of the sensitive acquaintance, extreme point unifying of the romantic philosophy, it has acted like radio-controlled in our vision of the life. If we look at to the history of the European thought, even with lenses initials Benjamin, we notice that it exists, close to the territories of the crisis and of the nothing, a territory in which flourishing still "something," and from this least reality a different relationship with the world of the representation is built, looking at to the unconscious freudiano, not understood like mythical kingdom of the mothers, in which they place trust eternal truth, on the contrary in his effect of "conflict" that cross the language. There is to the inside of the modern- and Montale gives to us a top measure with his poetic discourse of it - a point of discard: the breakthrough of the thought of the transfiguration is dealt with that there makes perceive a change that goes well beyond the horizon of death of the short-lived, of the ephemeral, of the loss.

         If we look the papers of Balsamo of the years Eighty - they are seen: "La lettera" (1980), "Percezioni" (1981), "Evoluzioni" (1981), "Visione scomposta" (1982) - we there find a difficult operation of equilibrium: between color, sign, and image, between "temps perdu" and found again time, between inward autobiography, confession, chronicle, between lived life and play to live between earth and sky, between story and thin romanticism, that opposes to the idea of "consumption." In these watercolors the stratification is triplex: a symbolic and internal relief, a level of recording of the psychic facts, a pictorial level. But these three stadiums of the Balsamo world stay three, they are three moments of a poetic, and they for fortune don't cancel out in a cumulative and useless discourse. Quite because each made stays isolated, we find an individual reading. Balsamo in these his works are not more a researcher of the sign, but a collector, a file-card writer that builds as his language. Distempers like: "Profondo blu" (1999), "Aria" (2000), "Scomporre un'idea" (2001), tacked on the cold tones of the blue or of the violet, they have crossed from minute and vibrating signs, all self-like, they have like objective that of express the pulsate of the life, of build a "diary" of the swarming urban rhythm (the artist has lived in along to Paris and to Rome), and they underline the sense of anguish given birth to from the big metropolis.

         All these papers want to tell us that the more and more voracious consumption, the passing of the message in the existence, is not a drown in the banality, but a growth of the desire of arrive to the "beautiful," and if the artist pursues the painting until inside the sign and in the color, it is not for save the art from the contamination, on the contrary for discover it, for see it shine in an inevitable hybridization of the belongingses and of the exist.

         The images - not uninjured from a loving memory of Picasso - they don't ever stay on a level, the color expands to different levels, breaks in thousand minute touches, pulverized, pregnant of light, with a discontinuous dilution that any doesn't impoverish the substance, even raises again the stamps of it, they are cold or hot.

         To Balsamo presses express a reality, that is not only mere frontality of the visual world, but it is also same substance of the feeling, in a perennial transformation of the sensitive that is the same trembling time conscience of the life and of the meditate in silence. If we move between the pictures of the section devoted to the oils- that they in this case are distributed on five years of work (1998- 2002). you observations that we are to make takes back what has told in the first part of this writing, but also for we as have read previously in the papers.

         Balsamo shows, with clarity, of don't retain essential for his creative run arrive to a pure abstraction, of pure geometric forms, and this stays to point out that his availability is not for the immovable property, but for the vital impulse, for a continuous vibration and changing imaginative situation. In this way the artist participates to the world, take away again the hidden, intense, poetic strength.

         If we look at "Nel cuore, nell'anima" (1988), "Solstizio d'estate" (1998), "Fuga dalla realtà" (2000), "In ascesa" (2001), we feel that the color has made sensitive and soft intentionally that it compromise to the "penetration" bright, the subject gets ready to become light, and the painter extends to paint the light in his chromatic essence, without to deny a bark of memory of nineteenth-century matrix and romantic. We can like perceive a bright suspended subject that thickens and landslide, for which instead of exploding in the heart of his splendor, it proceeds toward become dark spaces. The pictoric relationship instead of go off is exalted for a vibration that grows on if same, while the sign, unexpectedly, it bleeds under the filter of an emotion, and it lights an aurora with timidity.

         An anxious restlessness winds however to the inside of the space, that is dyed of an atmosphere of amazement for the quiver unpredictable of the shines that accompany the dynamic carrying out of the runs mark us. The compositions are all one connection of forms that they correspond the a to the other in inverse sense. On everything the silence is warned, the flow of the rhythms inside a space that wadding, that picks up, that lessens. There is a grieved tension in him disclose "the belongingses not yet born," like did Klee. Balsamo belongs to the narrow one group of artists, that they have been made know in the second post war period, and they have conducted their work, with underground energy, toward a spirituality that in other periods would have stayed definite religious, or mysticism, mysticism in the sense of establish a dialogue between the visible and the invisible, between space and time, living the need to make communicable a similar experience.

         The conception of the spatiality of Balsamo "Chiaro di luna" (2001), "Rapsodia in blu" (2001) it becomes more and more elastic and distant from each concreteness "finished." It would be told that the artist wants to lose itself creation in the universe from him. And the word "lost" stays in the sense of share more that of sinking, looking for his identity with situations slightly internal. The problem of the sign, for Balsamo, coincides with the problem of the "I". Without signs there is not I, there is not his relationship with the world, the his is a "I" that he doesn't have confinements, he is fluctuating, swell and contracts him, involving in his breath: the internal and the exterior.

         The pictures of Balsamo appear and are composed, on fields of tension that are originated event-light from the relationship: they are in their scores hypersensitive surfaces "detectors" of dawning events of light and of color, of breakthroughs and of sinkings, of approaches and of leaving, of incipient spatial perspectives, lost in a sea of brightness- "Luci improvvise" (2002), "Dominante in rosso" (2002) - like it happens on the ochre ancient Roman's houses walls, or in a veneto sky to the sunset.

         In these last works - veered on the tones of the pink, of the red, of the violet - the form is not subtracted more to the thought, but it becomes ahead in a flash, in a lightning, in a clot of energy, like a lightning in the his instant, but illuminating, truth.

         What we therefore perceive in front of these works it is the leavening of the thin subject, the lightness, the absence of weight of the image. Everything seems to take nourishment magically, everything seems to originate, or float, in a deep sea of light. To this point needs to tell that the technique of our artist has stayed helped reach these results from his acquaintance of the Divisionism painting of Segantini, Pellizza, which was able to penetrate in the "space interstice", in the void that stays inside the belongingses (Segantini), and therefore while, unexpectedly, their surfaces settled in, was formed on of them like a crust of transparent beads, sort of rents deals with complementary approached colors, able of conduct us to a comparison with the chaos that stays under the skin of the belongingses, surrounds, at times, from mysterious and anxious shades. In as attempt of reproduction of the light and of the color the Italian Divisionism has stayed, for a toward, a direct carrying out of the realist analysis of the tones, of the chromatics values, and of their intercourses of tension. To difference of the French new - impressionistic that carried all the analysis on the visual fact, on the geometric logic, the divisionist also took an interest of the bonds between the mind and the hand. Our artists loved the "synthesis," and therefore an universal vision, cosmic, in which all the space is light, because the light is boundless irradiation, vital energy that exalts the forms and the subject, and it speak much of the spirit.

         Also Balsamo with the on the dense and thin pulls that they create the bottom of the picture ("Luci improvvise" 2002), he create straws furniture that fix the vibration of the light on the surface, and they begin to comparison with shades from the vanished contours that vanishes sudden in the space, creating a sense of astonishment suspension. Achieves a small materiality of the form of it. A light is dealt with that it is above all a magnetic halo, a physical datum and a datum spiritual subjectively, an atmospheric condition, a condition of life. The light is today the "imaginary face of the time", a face extended to show the proximity of a "extremely".

         If we look at more from near these works notice that the single forms are insert in a structural plant totally abstract, so the precise repetition of each single expressive nucleus, inside the same composition, takes away from the forms their temporal and historical oneness, steals from the incessant flow of the time, and sets it on an immaterial and transcendent piano. The light and the color become now a necessary landscape for a revaluation of the imaginary, realized in line with the characters of the contemporaneity.

         On this work however is still necessary an observation, the light that Balsamo offers us, is a light that explores the dark also for find the shade, in fact ours, and the his, truth doesn't stay probably neither in the dark neither in the light, neither in the good neither in the evil, like he has well understands the poet Paul Celan, that there invites to look at in the void for try to discover the striations of shade that there are hidden in him and, through of them images, forms, figures, that they lead us next to the enigma that we want to explore. Perhaps it is quite this the assignment of the art, in a world in degrade, where has made laughable the man by now wrapped from the heavy mantle of the suffering.