Etrusco Baldi - Arson

Flowers, or plants in general, as independent subjects, began to appear in still lifes, a genre that emerged in the early 17th century. Subsequently, painters, especially the Impressionists, increasingly focused on the world of flowers and plants, as an extraordinary opportunity to capture vibrant colors and light. Thus, flowers and plants were depicted not only in vases, but also immersed in their natural landscape. While initially it was a pretext for painters to attempt a photographic reproduction of reality, with contemporary art, the subject of flowers and plants also becomes a way of interpreting reality. In this work, part of the series "Inside and Outside of Me," the artist Etrusco, assisted by his son Andrea Baldi, develops a highly original iconographic model, in which the plant subject is combined with a sophisticated abstract geometric elaboration.

The series of works known as "Inside and Outside of Me" was developed by artist Etrusco, together with his son Andrea Baldi, starting in the 1990s. The artist completely reworked his artistic practice, previously characterized by still lifes distinguished by a marked formal purity and compositional balance, in the direction of an original and refined experimentalism. Etrusco's new language involves a seamless fusion of figurative and abstract art, combining the plant theme with a geometric synthesis of pure shapes and colors. Even the plant element itself undergoes a very pronounced pictorial synthesis, being emptied of form to be resolved in a decidedly expressionistic manner through color, in an almost gestural and material application. This figuration interacts perfectly with the abstract space created through a process of geometric reconstruction of perception that gives rise to highly balanced compositional schemes. The plant subject coexists perfectly with the squares, lines, and colored fields, drawing greater expressive force from the pure perception expressed by the shapes.

The artist Fernando Baldi (1924-2018) deliberately adopted the pseudonym "Etrusco" with the intent of recovering an ancient painting technique that had been widely used by that civilization, especially in the decoration of tombs. We are talking about encaustic, which involved mixing various pigments with wax. Etrusco revived this technique, using it on panels prepared with cellulose and vinyl substances. This allowed him to create his perfect still lifes in which the encaustic technique, in fact, allowed him to achieve a perfect fusion between objects, endowed with material consistency, and densely atmospheric space. Starting in the 1990s, now steadily supported by his son Andrea Baldi (1953), he developed the series "Dentro e fuori di me" (Inside and Outside of Me), in which research into painting technique and materials is combined with experimentation with stylistic language.

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