Domenico Balbi was born in Genoa on February 1, 1927. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in this city.
For many years, the name Domenico Balbi has been widely known both in Italy and abroad as one of the most talented painters and engravers of his generation.
His extensive graphic production ranges from the simple emotion of landscapes to the most sensitive psychological exploration or the most refined esoteric research into the magical world.
Balbi is a phenomenon, worthy of the utmost attention. However, it would be inaccurate to claim that he approaches painting through drawing: he illustrates the eternal issue of the relationship between drawing and color. This young artist from Genoa was, in fact, very early on aware that the solution naturally lay in the act of creation, as it seems that, in the light of Art, the problem does not even exist. For Balbi, the act of drawing or engraving is never prepared, sketched, or planned, but is always felt by him at a specific moment. His painting does not derive from a pre-established graphic structure, but rather it is a chromatic encounter, and for luminous relationships, a structural and formal definition is applied.
Repeating Van Gogh’s famous phrase, it has been said of Balbi that he “drew as he breathed”; upon examining his works, one is, today, tempted to affirm that he “paints as he draws.”
The extreme rigor, in fact, the exceptional purity of his graphics, is found with perfect coherence in his pictorial production, so that his paintings never give in to the suggestions of chance or insidious satisfactions. He paints with a use of color that is always expressive but never naturalistic. However, when approaching Balbi’s painting from the beginning, one notices how natural the images are, as his painting is distinctly mental.
In this sense, Domenico Balbi’s work appears within the most vivid issues of contemporary painting, an issue, however, that he himself defined spontaneously.
This numbered and signed engraving featured in a book published in the 1960s/70s Elle et Eux, a collection of art works by female artists where the subjects of the work are also mostly female.
Unmounted, unframed, about 18x13cm on a sheet approx 26x21cm
He also produced coloured versions, an example below
