Alessandro Baldini was born in Bologna in 1956.
Painter, engraver and photographer, he attended the Art School, the Academy of Fine Arts and the School of Anatomy Design at Rizzoli Orthopaedic Institute of his city. He has taken part in various solo and group exhibitions including: 1996 "La Salara" Gallery in Bologna, 1997 "Sala Silentium" in Bologna, 2000 "Sala Silentium" in Bologna, 2001 Stefano Forni Gallery in Bologna, 2004 Castiglione Art Gallery in Bologna, 2006 Gnaccarini Gallery in Bologna, 2011 Museum of Santa Caterina in Treviso.
...... That we have not had the chance to see each other more often in the course of our lives is something I regret on the rare occasions when we are together. …He is a careful listener to the surrounding environment; he conveys an intense emotional involvement and a readiness to give.
He is a polite person, sensitive and loving, in short, one of those whose company helps you reconcile yourself with life. Witty and agreeable as you would expect a person living in Bologna to be, Alessandro Baldini demonstrates his fondness of his area also in the choice of his artistic subjects.
When Baldini paints, he shows particular aptitude for atmospheric scenes. His inner world mirrors the hills around Bologna which he has come to love by following hunters and dogs as a child, and that have gradually become synonymous with nature. And in that nature you encounter farmhouses, like mute and abandoned rural architectures which are allowed archaeological survival, though misplaced in an age that does not know what to do with them and no longer knows about their past. Eliminating any human presence, he deals with glimpses of life marked by silence, as in an experiment where the universe is inhabited by secluded houses. The effect is of a superior quietness. And I think that Baldini paints partly to reach this inner state of deep calm, so characteristic of his art. Like an enchantress, the Bolognese hills call him to the easel and palette. He questions her as he would a Sibyl, putting on canvas her enigmatic answers, with an involvement that is not surprising to those who know him, and with
the technical skill of those who have long worked with commitment under master painters...
Pier Massimo Forni (Poet and writer)
One is enveloped, with eyes stunned, in an eloquent silence, in Alessandro Baldini’s landscapes of memory. Reminders hover here, of a life truly lived among the green woods, the ancient paths which lead to peasants’ houses in the villages of the Apennines, the unforgettable intoxication of the brackish waters of the Mediterranean.
Baldini, a landscapist who can raise the art of painting to the level of phenomenological action, reveals with each brushstroke a deep emotional bond with a world which seems gone forever.
His painting foregrounds an evocation in which color becomes the very phenomenon of materiality, which at times lights up in unexpected leaps, at times calms itself into soft, magical evanescence. Visions bordering on the dreamlike, thanks to the mastery of a sensitive touch forming layerings of color, transparencies which lead, almost tentatively, to an abstract naturalism… a carefully crafted quest for refined explorations of signs through a deep-digging technique, featuring the beauty of color and the material structure in which signs themselves, like rhythmic furrows, seem almost traces of ancient writing… from these, Baldini’s compositions, in refined formal perspective, remind us that, in addition to being a painter, he is also an expert photographer. He writes with light, and so invites us to a contemplation of nature which becomes a cathartic act of purification, leading us to an understanding of the world and to self-improvement.
The artist thus approaches a finely honed lyricism, the music provided by a delicate palette of warm, enveloping colors. They are the colors of sand, rust, clay; they are the warm, subtle colors of the earth which jump out, dominating even where the main theme is water – water which surges through canals, swells rivers, and finally comes to rest in the sea.
Atmospheric colors, grated and grating, sometimes barely suggested, sometimes thick and full of impasto. At times, the border between earth and air is imperceptible; one melts into the other in an eternal embrace, singing the greatness of creation. Air, light, and sign melt together to create a perfect synthesis, blending into a single painterly organism which invites the viewer to enter, not with a mere “looking from outside,” but allowing oneself to be carried away, as if hearing with all the senses.
Alessandro Baldini’s esthetic gives life to a kind of painting which is at times nostalgic, intimate, fruit of a marriage of ancient and modern, between that which was and that which has remained. Ancient knowledge of the past, memory which can live again through the view of a beach, a hill, or the distant houses of a town. These are silent, meditative landscapes where nature takes the leading role and speaks of liberty. A spontaneous nature, mostly wild, only minimally “tamed” by a humanity which leaves nothing of itself but a mere sign of passage: streets, houses, and nothing else. Here humanity vanishes into the mists of time.
Simona Negrini (art historian)
Translation by: John C. McLucas, Professor Emeritus of Italian, Towson University USA.
Alessandro’s painting is the poetics of memory, something which we constantly risk losing in our frenetic lives. It’s not so much his eye as his way of pausing, the patience of the moment in which the visual spirit illuminates every painting. From the towns painted with such sweet nostalgia to the trees that recall photographs of the late 1980s-early 1990s, to the landscapes between earth and sea almost as if there were a border existence where humans must stop between the finite bush and the infinite blue… that is where the artist gathers memory, frames the moment, and bestows a deep calm on things. In both his oils and his watercolors, one senses calm, a tranquility which lightens the soul of its daily load of weariness – I would almost say a refuge where the artist and the observer find peace and order, not so much in materiality as in the spirit. Another aspect, an important one in my opinion, is the way color, often brilliant, often cool and controlled, is used to spark a light movement which simply supports that inner calm we all need. Towns are peaceful, comfortably situated on hills or mountains; seated figures have restful eyes, and so too the trees and the seasons. Poetry has its rhythms, as does the landscape and the one who depicts it. But above all it is essential that the viewers of the paintings should fully take in these rhythms in order to enter into them and make them their own.
Luca Ispani (poet)
Translation by: John C. McLucas, Professor Emeritus of Italian, Towson University USA.
The hill is to the west of the Via Emilia and it is seen from the other side of the ravine. It is inhabited by peregrine falcons and foxes, bathed by the autumn rain and parched by the hot summer. The vineyards on its ridges yield a sour and strong wine like the character of the few who are still living there, it’s the hill of memories ...as silent as Alessandro Baldini’s world.
It's a place of memory that Baldini traces with the certainty of one who has always loved those landscapes.
The silences that fill his paintings are not upsetting; they have the serenity of one who finds them comforting in the evening, in his study one mile away from the noise of the outside world.
There is no human presence in his paintings, but they are perceived ... they are hidden in the vegetation or committed to their business as usual, behind the windows of timeless houses.
They are waiting to be found out by the painter, in order to be portrayed and highlighted with the same talent with which he reproduces the atmosphere of their country fields.
feeling experienced in a moment and never forgotten. It is the communication through the tools of painting, which do not aim to astonish, but to seduce and reach a sincere emotional sharing.
It is thanks to his sincerity that I feel like his friend, because he shows things mildly and forcefully at the same time, but without any conceit. There is a painting that I really love: its title is "Colline a Mongiorgio", oil on canvas of medium size. It portrays a white road that recalls Morandi’s painting. It rises gently from the valley below. The clouds in the sky are those typical of a September afternoon when alfalfa has already been cut, and on the bushes, the latest blackberries ripen. The atmosphere is rarefied and welcoming thanks to the masterly brush strokes which made it.
The dreamlike atmosphere is almost tangible, like in an ancient painting. It recalls Fattori's tables, but the white road is present because Baldini has walked through it many times, at least in his thoughts, it is the road that links the past to his present. He has the presence of one who paints sincerely, beyond ephemeral things and fashions.
Stefano Forni (Art dealer)
.....In times of "video installations" and gestural, mysterious, hidden alchemies, meetings with seriously engaged artists are becoming rare, especially with those proposing their own itinerary made of accessible images; authors who are willing to declare their choices although they belong to the evidence of natural life or to our environment. After regular academic studies, Baldini has long dealt with forgotten atmospheres, with the hidden presence of usual, loved paths, where he can pick nostalgic aspects of a kind of existence that now appears to be far away.
Luciano Bertacchini (Art critic, painter)
.... we told the schoolchildren who visited his exhibition that art must bear witness to the historical, social, political and cultural moment in which we are living. But how does one insert his poetic landscape in the context of this statement? Maybe it's by paraphrasing Quasimodo that we succeed. "And how could we sing ....." said the poet "while complaining about the pain of a ruinous war…", and, I might add, how can you, Mister Baldini, let the yellow mimosa in spring or the intensity of colored primroses bloom, now that we are all facing such a concerning historical period, whose limits can’t be outlined yet? We are flying over the course of our history and we find ourselves in between two "histories": we have left the history of the past, but we haven't started the history of the future yet,... in a subtle and varying suspension, that is perceivable in Baldini's works!!!
Maria Luisa Caminiti (Art dealer)