At first glance, a reading of franco beraldo's works leads one to define this artist as a 'painter of return', a citationist and anachronist.
In fact, against the dominance of anicontal art, which dominated a large part of the second half of our century, he contrasts his figuration which, for the poetic and pictorial quality that distinguishes it, stands above the mass of generic figurative art but, for the evident echoes of which it is charged, also manifests assonances with the works of some masters of the first decades of our century.
His paintings are not uncommon and, due to the reworking of the formal language and the clarity of the images, they remind us of the painters of the "return to order" who followed the great lesson of Piero della Franciscan, or those who, in those years, chose the path of primitivism or those of magical realism.
Just as it is unthinkable to pass over in silence the fact that the magic, the yearning, the melancholy, the enchanted silence that hover in many of his works have precedents in de chirico's metaphysical works. but for such encounters, reflections or echoes - which are, moreover, always of high quality and such as to be defined as merits and not demerits - i believe it is misleading to speak of citationism when, in my opinion, we are dealing with spiritual affinities. on the other hand, if there were any need, there is proof of his pictorial form which is absolutely autonomous with respect to that of the masters whose memory we most easily recall.
And it is precisely his form that demonstrates how this artist is not only a child of our times, but also a contemporary one, how his painting possesses precisely the values that characterise abstract art and its pure and self-sufficient form.
In his paintings, objects are reduced to occasional supports for the values of painting: they have become schemes, emblematic essentialities, flat two-dimensional coloured surfaces that obey the sole rules of light, harmony and musicality.
In his landscapes, as in his still lifes, the objects, borrowed from real life and from outside the work and chosen from among those in common use but characterised by ready recognisability, are never described, they are not realistic because they have been purged of every occasional and temporal detail.
Of these objects, Beraldo presents only the space they could occupy, their coloured volume devoid of any weight and of any material of the object itself; he presents the decanted and allusive image of them, enhanced, however, by a strong charge of lyricism and sonority.
Beraldo does not present us with landscapes and objects but with the breath of them, identified in an ideal atmosphere dominated by a languid but vivid grace that can be encountered, this one really, suspended between sea and sky, only in the hour of the meeting of the sweet but strong, intense and bright Mediterranean landscape.
The hour chosen by Beraldo for his landscapes is indefinable, it is the one that brings us closer to the illusion of being able to live forever. eternally. without end. it is the one that characterises the works of classicism.