L’Oro della Lontananza | Francesco Balsamo 2023
curated by Antonio Grulli

Francesco Balsamo is an artist, a poet and a friend. It often happens that we are together for a beer or on a tour of exhibitions or more simply in his tiny studio, where everything is a surprise, amidst the collections of small, tiny drawings and the bulky tapestries that have preoccupied his thoughts for some years now. Thirty-four years have passed, a third of my life, since that first, to say the least, inauspicious encounter when, discovered among the classrooms of a dilapidated academy, I invited him to an exhibition... my first ever... which he deserted at the last minute, leaving the wall blank... just long enough to put a stop to it, to look to others; yet since then I have tried to go beyond those escapes that recur over time, because we are friends and above all because he is a great artist.
Working for this exhibition I would say that it has been worth it, to be patient, sometimes to endure in silence, waiting for everything to calm down and turn to gold for a moment. A brief pause anyway, because escape is always lurking, a rushing forward, an anticipatory need, a resetting of uncertainty to write a new piece of one's own story, waiting for me to catch up with it.
1. Time
A horizon framed by a golden thread recounts eight years of production, slow, macerated in the thin Chinese paper the texture of which reveals hidden memories, a snapshot that the poet captures in the blink of an eye, and which the artist elaborates moment by moment. It almost seems like a vaticinium: the spontaneously poured oil stains the paper, the artist interprets its meaning and then translates it into a process that, sign after sign, elaborates a tale. As indefinite as it is precarious, because if you don't take the drawing out of his hands (a gesture that is by no means metaphorical), I don't know, with an exhibition, a publication, or some other escape from the studio, he will endlessly transform it. And here is the time of an instant. An instant to grasp the prophecy, an instant for each gesture, an instant for each image in the story, an instant to rework it, an instant to take it out of his hands, with the remorse of interrupting a process that moment by moment is infinitely improved.
Small drawings, miniatures that expand out of all proportion...
2. Space
A few square centimetres that with feigned extravagance are translated into millimetres, almost as if to hide the discomfort of justifying their value. That of a handkerchief, or of a postage stamp whose quality does not lie in rarity, but in its ability to evoke memories, fantasies, dramas, pleasures, which, as in a dream, are coordinates of our imagination. Here then, that tiny space of tormented graphite expands in space and like each frame of a film expands on the screen, showing an imaginary without boundaries.
Each drawing on the wall is aligned at the bottom, 80 cm apart, a perceptual device that, in its banal repetitiveness, generates a horizon that at each point attracts attention and opens up the visual field, to the point of inducing us to lose consciousness of physical space by projecting us into an immensity.
3. The tale
As soon as the eye focuses on the miniature, each story suddenly appears, and there one must be ready not to lose it and fix it in one's consciousness.
At this point, however, it is wiser to listen to the words of the artist:

you always have in mind / a burning candle / would bear the fire of touching it / you see how it grips the ceiling / with its feminine motion / you see what it owes to the darkness around it.

For some time I have tried to combine drawing and writing in verse, letting drawing or writing verse prevail alternately; now I believe there is no difference between the two practices.

Drawing, writing, animate the same bodily and celestial adventure, restless and in constant demand, not of a meaning, but rather of an even more secret key, traceable to the very nature of seeking or living.
And in the meantime, the gaze does something else, it always does something else, so the artistic work is to chase that gaze that never stops seeing without needing to understand, it only takes with it.

To question oneself about time, about the fragility of being alive, of being in a dream and at the same time awake in the events of the present.

To believe that creative work can be inspired by the disruptive force of a simple candle, which recalls and pays homage to the sacredness of a vision.

And what the gaze grasps with analytical lucidity is immersed in the fluctuating sea of the memory of things seen or imagined, of possible yet incongruous connections, where precisely lies the calibrated breath of poetry.

The need for imaginative freedom, where indeed nothing is entirely manifest even though it is a recognisable sign of the real.

first the shadow, / has the great hump of breath - / last the shadow, / knows the stumbling of saying, / looks for something and loses its head, / rushes past and sinks to the bottom.