Alex Bertaina

Alex Bertaina is a self-taught painter and was born in Turin in 1963. He lives and work in Cuneo in North West Italy and writes here about his life and sources of inspiration.

Since I was a child drawing has been a prime channel of expression for me. I remember that, at school, I enjoyed making pictures from the incomprehensible scribbling of my classmates. My training came at first from the late Marco Lattes, who helped me to correct gaps in my knowledge of working with watercolour.

In the early 1990’s I had a close pictorial association with my friend Pierpaolo Giraudo. We shared a trip to the Aosta Valley in search of picturesque views.

A Dream in my Soul

A memory often arises in me when I come home. A picture where I see a pristine landscape in which prevails a diffused warm lighting that envelops everything.

This desire to work in pristine landscapes, unspoiled by man has been with me since my childhood. I tried to create my own world in the jumble of scribbles made by my classmates.

In my work I portray the tension and stress of modern living where nothing ever stands still and we are quickly overwhelmed by the frenzy of passing time.

I do not surrender to it and I seek for purity in a contaminated place due to human intervention on the environment , where the profit was not able to defend the territory causing him serious injuries.

Elizabeth Planca described my work thus: “Composition that mingles perspective planes in an almost futurist simultaneity but without movement and fury. In their place, the quiet of memory.”

I seek for this movement with cuts of light that often cross my work. This represents a guiding light or big arms wrapped around trees, houses, roads and waterways, segmenting nature and making it react using a juxtaposition of colours.

Vertical or horizontal cuts and superimposing interplays, dismantled and dense images that look like rainbow geometries full of light and colour; which reflects its vibrancy and brilliance.

Painting is for me this dreamed landscape.