About
Luigi Ballarin
Luigi Ballarin has began his artistic career in the 90s in Venice; in 2000 he moved to Rome and, after an invitation for a personal exhibition, he fell in love with Istanbul and started to work there.
He currently lives and works in the three cities, creating a union between different cultures with a unique and original language, thanks to his ability to weave together different artistic traditions, highlighting points of contact and communication.
The cultural exchange belongs to the soul of his homeland, Venice, which has welcomed languages, customs, stories, works of art from different worlds over the centuries.
Luigi Ballarin's art is a union between East and West and summarizes in iconic images the suggestions of the minor arts, which travelled the paths of trade and travellers, and merged the different traditions: the decorations of majolica, enamel of goldsmiths, embroideries of precious fabrics.
His figures follow the two-dimensional rhythms of Byzantine painting and are decorated with an original technique, characterized by raised material backgrounds, which evoke mosaics, enamels, ceramic decorations, carpets.
The color and acrylic enamel are enriched by metallic effects that give a great brightness to his works, narrating memories and evocations, emotions and tales, symbols and spirituality.
Other paintings tell the story of the Middle East, with a painting that becomes a sort of silent reflection, with images created by small brush strokes, which flecks almost abstract representations.
Luigi Ballarin, with his symbolic and timeless art, testifies to the possibility that the union of different cultures and traditions can merge into a poem of peace.
Alessandra Cusinato
An open dialogue between East and West, between two complex and multiple cultures both from a substantial and a formal point of view. Luigi continually offers us the two souls: that of birth and that of election. There is nothing more Venetian in this. Venice gives birth to you and then pushes you out to seek the other from you, only to find him next door when you return home, in a spiral of encounter and re-encounter.
Elena Ballarin, 2018