Places of feelings and not of reality.
Bertaina Alex is a painter who has grown and matured a lot. His painting started from the reality that even now still relies on figuration, but it evolves in personal compositions, which compose a mosaic of intimate emotions.
Mosaics of cracked walls, almost a frame of a story line, which overlaps and splits up according to ordered rhythms. Elements of ancient villages, or rather a precise and mysterious village that holds all the memories, containing the remembrances and hopes. Calm and soft colors that "wrap" the daily affections, still lives always set between "those old walls" and so much loved, that they become recurrent ghosts of ones own creative fantasies.
Silences, not loneliness or melancholy, in the paintings of this sensitive author who has stubbornly committed to achieve this goal, which now identifies him strongly.
Summoning that hold back time, which stop the seasons, which bring us back, deeply towards the evening, to reflect on what remains of an abandoned courtyard.
The silver charm of stone, walls that ooze stories of men and bell towers.
Closed main doors, dark roofs and windows, with moons that lighten above everything.
Recurrent elements as the common thread of a precise reference, which has roots that sink deep in the far places of the soul. Places of feelings and not reality, it’s how I wish they were, because it’s how I feel them and read them. Withered flowers in autumn, grapes and leaves, wooden spoons and bulbs, fruit, wooden chairs, cast iron stoves in kitchens of our ancestors.
Even the object is for Bertaina a constant search of memory, a close connection with the origins, almost an umbilical cord that will never be severed.
I end with the illusion that these very pleasant images will reduce even more of realism, to fragment and distill for us all "privacy" essential to our survival, in defense, "within the enchanted walls."
Claudia Ferraresi
La Morra (CN) Italy