Description
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.
Antonella Michelon recently wrote of my work “… Sky and sea united, as united is our existence between transport towards nature and departure from it because of our discordant lifestyle, but the sea, where everything flows, takes away the fears, the stress and gives us back moments of peace” … “Maybe my sky and my sea are united, as our existence, between transport towards nature and departure from it and they shall treat these wounds.”
Elizabeth Planca also wrote, “Composition that mingles perspective planes in an almost futurist simultaneity but without movement and fury. In their place, the quiet of memory.”
The full collection is also available in our London gallery.