FRANCO BALDASSARRE [1955] lives and operates in Soleto, in the province of Lecce [Italy]. Completed regular studies in the field of figurative arts, and in the same time in classic music, entered still very young in the world of contemporary painting, showing from the beginning a strong personality and rich creativity. He received several critics appreciations and assents by the artistic wirld, and a large partecipation to important national and international contests [in Europe and America], where he was always awarded with general assents. Among the last aknowledgements must be remarked First Prize "Città di Ferrara" [1996], First Prize and Critics Award "Città di Alessandria" [1997], and the decoration of honour awarded by The Accademy of Abbruzzi for Sience and Art [1995]. Gino Spinelli de' Santelena, Mario De Marco, Vittorio Balsebre, Antonio Miccoli, Vito Cracas, Pio Rasulo, Vittorio Zacchino, Antonio Farì, Maria Francesca Giordano, Alfredo Pasolino have written about him. He is present on Arte Moderna, n. 28, "Dal secondo dopoguerra ad oggi", ed. Giorgio Mondadori, Milano, 1994; Dizionario enciclopedico d'arte contemporanea, '93-'94, ed. Alba, Ferrara, 1994; Annuario Comed 1994, n. 21, Milano; Catalogue of "Salone italiano di arte contemporanea", ed. Arte Studio, Firenze; Art and Selection words '95-'96, ed. Marco Binci, Osimo; Rassegna dell'arte contemporanea pugliese 1945-1993 by D. Carone and W. Scotti, ed. Centro Culturale Rosselli, Martina Franca, 1994; Soleto, una città della Grecìa salentina, by Michele Montinari, ed. Schena, Fasano, 1992. Former Professor at the Liceo Artistico in Taranto, he teaches now at the Secondary School in the Province of Lecce.
 

Making a secure and wise use of the expressive means, both with acrylic, oil and water-colour, Franco Baldassarre is able to recreate fashionable and suggestive atmospheres where evocation becomes a palpitant and living narration that understands the hope for everything to be recovered to the present times...

Mario De Marco



The mood of intimate melancholy we find in the first paintings by Baldassarre gradually leaves room to a painting more congenial to his temperament.(...). And here we sometimes find sudden brightness of the sky, glows (...). Both a symbol and a wish, a festivity which is the symbol of the whole Salento, of its inhabitants, of their laboriousness, of their feeling, always underlined by music and songs, colours, clear skies, set on fire by the sun at sunset.

Vittorio Balsebre



The preference for the "diurnal" colours of the land becomes, rather than the succession of photographic plates, the "reflective" synthesis of eye and thought, and contemporarily the sudden immersion in remote belongings. The poetics of day, present in in the first works by Franco Baldassarre, leaves room to the poetics of night in the most recent paintings: folk festivals, with the predominance of blue, dark red, yellow of the illuminations. Here, immemorial memory becomes living of the conscience, expressive sphere, feeling, to be sought after beyond the shown things: rather, in that chaste and intense look of the nights in the South.

Antonio Fari'



The characteristic element of Franco Baldassarre’s artistic expression is a real feeling of things, a constant image of the existential living. His world is, in fact, that of relationships, connections, of the human aggregate coagulating in social intimacy (...). In his works the group is recurrent, in a multitude of passions and motives, constituting the counter - denunciation of solitude, indifference, of the existential anxiety.

Pio Rasulo



At the first glance of unity, the observer catches two dominant elements in the works: the feast of music and the strength of colours, both universal languages for feelings. Reflecting more carefully, thematic and cromatic details, that give great prominence to Franco Baldassarre’s paintings, emerge. The represented human figures divest themselves of their individuality to become a wavering throng, a multitude crowding numerous a place of feast: at the circus, on the roundabout, at the market, in the orchestra, in the band... Paradoxically indetermined and anonymous people get transfigured and rise to the role of protagonists: “ Today it’s holiday...” (Saba). Everyone vanishes in the joyful meeting, becomes annihilated to recognise himself in the unity of tradition, customs, folklore. This art that derives from the merry range of folklore, wondrously destroys the circles of “provincialism” and “particularism” and anachronistically reveals the universal characters “of the one that joins the manifold, the Whole”. Under the chromatic point of view, we go from the predominance of “earth” and blue of the first period to the characterizing choice of the last paintings, where yellow rules upon green and blue, almost to embody the exuberance of life over the cold daily monotony.

Maria Francesca Giordano
 


The list of still lives and of rural landscapes, characterized by a vivid chromatism, is a burst of luxuriant inflorescences, emporium of feelings, alternatively discreet and cosy, typical of the familiar universe or instinctive and passionate of nature. In the paintings with sunflowers and those with fields in bloom, you perceive a dynamic perception of forms: the looming of the heat and the movement of the wind, translated through secure strokes of the brush and with that wise dissonance of the colour, counterpoint of warm and cold tones that reveals everything of a kind of painting of great emotional hold.

Antonio Miccoli



Of the two compositive repertories that are characteristic of Franco Baldassarre’s painting, the figurative one – that often includes foreshortenings of urban views – seems to evoke, though in a very personal way, some utrillian images connected to the cultural background of his Salento. The artist communicates a time and a space engraved in his own memory, yet effectively restored to the present time: the backgrounds of fun-fairs, of billiards-rooms or of patronal kermesses, not to talk of the dearest subject which is music, sometimes tell, with a soberly metaphysical syntax, a fellinian universe where the sign and shade of colour contribute to create eloquent synesthesis.

Antonio Miccoli



At the beginning of 1905 there were Van Gogh, Kirchner and Nold, with their anxieties, disruptive passionality, the stressed cromatic symbolism and the strong emotional and interpretative charge. Franco Baldassarre, enchanted and artistically “dazzled”on the way to expressionism, for a pictorial language which is singled out and released in the shadows of subconsciousness, sometimes instinctively “out of himself” in the aim to express his thought, symbolically interprets, with the material thickness of oil-colours, light-hearted scenes in colour. The absence of defined contours, the repetition of the figures, the colour nearly always opposed make the painting strongly bright and instructive towards reality, stressing the movement and the spontaneity of the composition. A selection of coloured works takes place in the surrealistic event. Because Baldassarre only thinks at conveying the emotion: the joy of the amateur and of the experimenter. We perceive his independence from academic painting, he prefers to sing night light and to stand on that symbolic Mediterranean window-sill that celebrates life lived moment by moment, full of motion, with the aim of catching the moment of happiness, between the inside and the outside of the retinic enjoyment: astonishment of light and free breathing of the material, releasing the rapid stroke, with marks of colour, sometimes clear and separated, undoing and reconstructing the forms, charging them with a vitality of their own. And this is the taste of painting of Franco Baldassarre, relaxed taste of painting and lyrical staccato of the stroke, throwing the colour from the form, in a personal way, defining an artistic parabola,of a stressed dynamic “writing” with the brush.

Alfredo Pasolino