QUOTES

A CONCRETE AND EXPRESSIVE ART

Alex Bertaina is an artist who describes reality with fragrant accents of poetry, sometimes with idyllic abandon, sometimes with a lively impulse. A delicate and, at the same time, energetic artist who has the gift of happily discovering various aspects of nature, historical and everyday landscapes, in a call of intimate, clear concentration of psychological atmospheres. They are light and gentle images, which nevertheless always find their consistency in a mixture that is as moving as it is tenacious and compact. To interpret his work we can look for some keywords: life, energy and research. His works, in fact, cannot be catalogued in a delimited region, enclosed in forced rhythms, delegated to a separate concept of living, of everyday life, of acting.
His path – although linked to the figurative world – is the ensemble of a concrete and expressive flow, as if it were tracing the modules and forms of energy within the specific function of the concept.
His technical expertise is concrete, as his ability to limit spaces and veils; his inner elaboration of themes is exspressive which he researches and studies throughout a great expansion.
Every concept, even the most immediate, is investigated and the support becomes the space where everything begins. Therefore, figurativism for the master is not only the point of view of man facing nature in its entirety; he penetrates nature, poetry, history, perceives its ravines, details, objects, gets confused and often almost unifies, he follows its forms.
Nature engages with man a confrontation, which can also be proposed in ironic terms, almost of gigantism for the use of industrial and artificial man. This ability to penetrate is very evident in Bertaina’s works.
Whoever decides to get closer to his art discovers then his feelings of sincerity, serenity and his joy of living. All permeated with a consoling hope, the one of always being able to admire and praise all the elements that give life to life. He paints with the commitment of a man who knows how to take everything seriously: the colour combinations, the perspective, the poetic atmosphere, the light. Consciously or unconsciously he recalls names and past rhythms, but in front of the immaculate canvas there is only him, the painter of the things of the world, always willing to interpret and express the wonderful world that belongs to him.
He recalls but does not copy anyone: he studies and asks for inspiration from the truth. He gives frankness to his painting: he wants, as he declares, to “sing” what he feels inside. Not simple technical exercises, but balances of cuts, planes, depths that characterize each one of his paintings.
With his pictorial “journeys” Bertaina feels happy. And he is not wrong, because his painting thanks to the thematic choice, has qualities to please, the sobriety in the detail, the careful research for tones and the often achieved effects, of airiness and light.
In front of his paintings, conversation between the Artist and the Public is not always easy and simple, the instinctive function has a moment of estrangement, but the aesthetic and emotional satisfaction immediately becomes certain.
Therefore, an unjustified label linked to instinct alone or to freely work with pindaric paths should not be attributed to the master from Cuneo: even the love of technique for technique, of the craft as an end in itself becomes introspection and a specific language. An absolute and undisputed technical skill emerges: the brush caresses the surfaces with unexpected glazes to become, when necessary, a robust underliner of a pseudo-material reshuffle that sculpts shadows and lights and creates three-dimensionality of the surfaces.

In summary I can affirm that Bertaina’s painting is characterized by an anxious, yet concise, extremely concise and variant form, with an immediate yet absorbed touch that, throughout its journey, always maintains its recognizable freshness and truth.

Cinzia Tesio

Cherasco (CN), Italy