Antonio Balletta

Antonio Balletta works in a variety of media, large graphite drawings, oil painting s and bronze sculpture. His images are skillfully rendered, elaborately staged works that use quiet drama, subtle expression as well as visceral symbolism as a conduit for both personal and universal narratives. By emphasizing aesthetics, he wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator, he creates compositions or settings that generate poetic images which ;balance on the edge of recognition and the subconscious. The images are an invitation into a story. Much of the symbolism derives from a synthesis of personal experience. Over the years he has developed a vocabulary of potent signs, each one iconic in its connection with humanity. Flowers, branches, boats, nests, kangaroos and other curious creatures populate his work. While his symbols imply tangible things he urges us to interpret them through our own experiences and mixed bag of memories. A branch may represent life’s forked and tenuous path yet it may also evoke metaphors for growth and energy, while the flowers can be read as repositories for feminine power, fertility and life’s transient beauty. The man in so many of his images represents himself, his sons and every man. His works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, allegories merge, meanings shift and the present fuses. Balletta's art inveigles us into its world through optimism for life journey. It makes us want to enter into the artists dialogue and decipher its allegorical tales. &