FADING - Angelo Bellobono


published in: 
Pyramid arts magazine, New York.
Italian American Community Newspaper, New York.



Angelo Bellobono is a talented Italian artist who lives and works in Rome and in New York. Trough painting, installation, video and performance his work focuses on the body intended as vehicle of identity, and in its physical, psycological, social, cultural and relational meanings.
His interesting analysis on human being and the social pressure over relationships carachterized several of his artistic projects, such as in the recent “Lowlife Wellbeing Center”, 2009. Paintings, drawings and a video investigated the gap between private emotions and codified social behaviour, ironically represented in the video by people training in a wellbeing center, that becomes the place of construction of limits and boundaries over the body, a fake refugee from fears, through re-modeling the body according to collective identitary models. In Bellobono’s project “Chist’è o’paese d’o’ sole” (2008), the analysys involved also globalization and immigration, and the body of the “other” as symptom of the necessity of a re-humanizing socio-economical politic.
His strong thematics, connected to a visual sense of poetry and a sense of irony, make Bellobono’s art strongly communicative and very appreciated, since his first solo exhibition in 1995 in San Diego (CA). It’s in painting where the artist’s concept gets a more rarefied carachter, where poetry and chemistry blend and get able to provoke our emotional sphere.
Angelo Bellobono paints bodies fading in their own fragility.
He liquifies and defines them in colour, and hides their identity in their intense glance, that deeply penetrates inside us. And their eyes tell us about captivity inside the body of social and cultural roles and models.
Individuals condamned to the tyranny of beautiful appearance, bodies yearning perfection to reach the desired place inside social, working, political and economical mechanics, or simply inside relationships, are deprived by the artist of the skin placed over theirselves by social expectations.
They’re like fading ghosts, so real that seem to belong to us, showing their limits and their frailty from canvases, melting the physical and the emotional. So their dark and intimate side appears.
Bellobono paints the struggle between being and appearing. His painting seem to reveal our fragile essence, that we hide in the shadow, far from indiscreet gazes, together with our deepest desires.
Emanuela de Notariis

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