There is something new in Franco Beraldo's painting. Indeed, a different kind of painting: along the path of research it has slowly taken shape for some time and has grown until now. What's more, it is the arrival of new abstract forms, or those that are almost completely tending towards the abstract. Here: forms and immediacy of rare signs such as to recall indications of fresh memories.
So let us go back to the time of his journey within painting and to the light that has sustained him along his thoughtful itinerary, up to the start of his current orientation. "I have always been aware of not falling into the trap of a clear-cut opposition between abstract and figurative", and this since the mid-1960s, where we see the beginning of the commitment to a form that has continued over the years.
It is the creative energy, which remains intact and is traced on the thought revealed by the words, that gives a different weight to the individual works, while it constitutes the antecedent to which Beraldo has always remained faithful. These are works between the preface, the serene journey and the arrival today in paintings linked together by internal relationships, in a painting of landscapes and still lifes.
And it is certainly an intense season, the one that led him to paint in the meeting, not out of quotation, but probably out of a call for further study, or out of a feeling of refuge, a sort of metaphysical suspension of blue skies, high horizons, almost dull yellow-green rocks, trees on mute houses, which stand out immersed in the motionless air: constructions articulated in the classical address in a perfect interlocking softened by shadows. They are silent landscapes set in a subdued light tuned to the harmony of minimal tonal varieties. And there is an intention: to fix the horizon, to select a detail of the landscape, to transfer it into pictorial vision according to the poetic intonation of simplicity and concreteness.
And naturally, even the fruit stands in a composition of a few turned objects, which Beraldo chooses and holds as human presences, are laid out on the canvases to be thus plastically closed in a synthesis at the perfect centre of a painting.
Then, looking at it, one realises once again that in the still life, as in the large and small landscape paintings, there is the confirmation of the measure, and even more the simplification of the forms, in the direction of a project of rigour, which could not, in the integrity of its intentions, last for years to come.
Today is the time for new works. The signal is in this opening of canvases, and it is the landscape that initiates the most recent painting.
A completely different start really transforms the production of which Beraldo knows the secret design, the concrete extension of the previous compositions.
A concentration of works anchored to the theme of the surface: what counts even more in the continuous series of works, is that Beraldo disarticulates the previous arrangement of painting, which has the novelty, in the loss of thickness, of inventing and developing, in the surfaces, a geometric compositional rhythm of joints and arcs and, above all, of contaminating superimpositions, in the presence, here more rare, of an active sign.
In any case, the vision of squares and backgrounds is recomposed in the evocation of an underlying thought of form, certainly constructed more from tesserae, although in some of these canvases a distant image of reality remains.
In these works and in others with a more totally abstract intention, Beraldo really changes the voice of colour. And he introduces splendour into the canvases, almost as if to reveal more profoundly the motivations for a different kind of painting: and it is especially there, in the cycle entitled Landscape, that the stained drafts of blue or the surge of reds with the value of sky.
No more adherence to nature.
Now Compositions and Red Angel in the Landscape further accentuate the abstract promises. The surfaces, through the fluid and bright colour, comment on a different matter: they absorb a variously dosed luminosity, while they transform the memory into a dream.
Beraldo certainly experiences this in this painting, which becomes a surprisingly modulated vision, where the light that already pursues the colour - the incandescence of red, the majesty of cobalt, the pressure of pink, the trepid whites, the sonority of the yellows - is evocative, from canvas to canvas, of emotion.
Maria Lucia Ferraguti