artist Alberto Ballocca

A couple of years ago, I finally took my family on a trip to Uluru. The idea for the trip had been implanted in me in 2018 after a powerful moment I had connecting to the land in Bundjalung country at Gaia Retreat in the Northern New South Wales of Australia. It’s fair to say I went to Gaia seeking something. Solitude?  Reflection? Answers? Every day I would go walking, always landing at the highest point of the property where a sculpture of a woman stood, beacon to the coastline she overlooked. I would stop there each day, sprawl on my side, allow the earth to hold me, and sob.

Gaia is a retreat of cleansing. Devices are limited. Only organic whole foods are served. No drugs or alcohol are permitted. I would dine in solitude. Spend most of my time alone. A woman approached me after dinner one evening and told me how she had seen me crying every day on the same patch of land. She wanted to tell me that the area I would stop at had once been a sacred place for indigenous women to commune. The penny dropped. For the first time in my life, I understood that my brain wasn’t running the show. I had felt something on that hill that compelled me to stop there. Many hands resting on my flank. Many voices hushing my mind. Sensations opening my heart that could not be explained by my oh-so-desperate-to-control-everything nervous system.

After the woman left me and returned to her table, I looked out the window, over the sprawling property and recalled reading somewhere that Uluru was regarded as the “solar plexus of the earth”, a belly of wisdom and strength, of autonomy and decision, of personal power and will. If the earth in Bundjalung country, touched by women who knew to feel lest to know, had shook me down like it did, I decided that to pull myself back together, I had to conjoin with the earth where Uluru stood. So, in December 2022 I took my family there.

I love the mystery of the stars. For me considering the universe feels like mounting the peak on a roller coaster. The gravity of the anticipation is so great, I must clench my eyes tight and surrender to the fall of it. One night we took an astro tour in Kata Tjuta National Park.  It was there that the guide pointed out that the stars we were admiring in that moment may have in fact died thousands of years earlier. It takes the luminous breath of some stars so long to reach us that if one died right now, perhaps only our grandchildren would witness its demise. Go out and look up in the sky tonight and you might be witnessing the past, a legacy, a living memory…this is the best way I can describe the effect that Alberto Ballocca’s art had on me.

What intrigued me about Alberto as a practitioner is that he seemed to be propelled by some sort of purpose rather than inspired by it. He confirmed my inkling by saying,

“I am driven and attracted at the same time (by) topics or…contemplations of nature (that) act as spiritual thrusts…Of course, the creative urge for me is physiological, like eating or sleeping. A psychic dimension to creativity within, since I was a child.”

Are you on a mission? Do you channel nature in your work?

“My mission is on my vision. I try to channel it into my work and research of natural aesthetic, capturing the determining fractal elements of a language, a bit like the Hieroglyphic language, like malleable matter, each work communicates with the others in respect to how I envision myself within the environment. I am interested in stimulating more thoughts regarding the ‘physis/nomos’ process, to put it briefly, the dimension of reflection in which the division between archaic and civil is determined.

The so-called civilized world is a tree rooted in the archaic. This antithesis is the source, a ‘fracture’ from which I get really inspired. In this way, and through artistic expression, instead of just philosophical approaches, the human world is not dissimilar from the natural one, in which the idea of renewal falls through the mediation of the geometric and mathematical order, in the material and timeless dimension.” 

It occurs to me that my questions for Alberto are unlike those I have asked most artists. I feel like a child tugging at her parents’ coat tails asking annoying questions about things she doesn’t fully understand but is desperate to know. When he shares with me some of his past and future projects, I get why I sense his authority on what I coined in my own research as “the intangible unknown”. The intangible unknown is the fabric of knowledge that can only be discovered through creative research, in any field – that is, research open to veering off the path of usual quantitative parameters. It doesn’t seek to prove anything, welcomes ‘mistakes’, using these detours as methods to discover what could not be hypothesised. Hypothesis’ by very nature presume a certain knowledge already exists, and if the scholarly arena builds solely on the tracks of what is known, we will essentially learn nothing “new”, we will only learn the predictions we make. Embracing the intangible unknown is where we truly make new discoveries. Creative fields inherently operate this way and in my view, academia would benefit from giving qualitative and creative research methods equal weight to more rigorous ones. As Alberto’s experience with both quantifiable knowledge and artistic research demonstrates,

“My initiation into the world of art began at the age of 19, transitioning from a regular job to fully dedicating myself to artistic research back in 2018. My works are expressions of a self-developed academic background subtly infused with artisanal influences. I have two studios and I work mostly with oil, acrylics, sprays, charcoal, pigments, clay, electronics and found objects. In November 2023 in Amsterdam, I was hosted by a gallery with which I am currently in contact for the presentation of my exhibited work project, ‘Orama’, in which I explained my technique taking into consideration some topics of Heraclitean philosophy. This gave me a lot of traction and introduced me to new people and collectors. The second project, ‘Island of Pun’ is currently exhibited in a gallery in Delaware, in a historic and prominent area for workshops and events. This project brings to light some mechanisms of the hieroglyphic language, which I am studying by attending the Egyptian Museum in Turin, where, without anticipating too much, I may have to catalogue more recent works that are older… In April, having acquired a work from the MMAC Museum of Paestum-Capaccio in southern Italy, I will be Artist-in-residence in a luxury hotel, completely immersed by the woods, among thousand-year-old native plants and local culinary productions. I will bring my research on the natural aesthetics and ancient cultures to another level… working on different installations and works that will remain permanently in the place, and I will present my ongoing project in mixed focus with a re-analysis of the Greek myth of Pandora and part of Parmenides’ philosophy, founder of the city connected to Paestum, an ancient crossroads of cultures of all kinds, today a re-nascent tourist centre, a land to which I will be honoured to give my contribution, one hour from Pompeii.”

There is an urgency about Alberto and his work, as if it carries a message that must be received. Given the organic and indigenous quality of both his sculptures and paintings I ask the artist if nature is his ally to this message.

“Now, think about the general concept behind the word ‘belief’, noun of the English verb ‘to believe’, and imagine you are staring in front of an Egyptian temple engraving that reports symbols of a bee and a leaf; you are looking at two distinct images, that once united, loose their figurative meanings becoming a linguistic sound, precisely, belief;  my message lies in the paths I follow to unite these parallels… 

“Every organ within my body connects to the others just as every little insect or huge natural phenomena are mysteriously linked and create this beautiful ecosystem.”

I have a sense that Alberto’s work, while beautiful and profound, is less about popularity and commerce and more about being a vessel for communication to cut through the modern ways to convey a message (through politics and satire) and instead rely on philosophy and spirituality (not religion)…

“What attracts me is the contemporary world, and where there is a lack of awareness I think art should intervene in whatever forms most fascinate the public, also in the resolution and prerogative of politics and satire, which more and more often become the same thing!”

Touche.

“…I don’t think social media can help maintain fame, not anymore. I know famous people who have something to say and I know those who are really famous, are outside of social media. Our psyche is not able to predict where certain things will lead, so it is not advisable to force the game too much.”

I ask him – Where do you feel more comfortable – exploring the ancient or channeling it through your work?

“Great question. I could say both, with the difference being that in my studio and in the creative process only some dynamics manage to flow creatively. In the fact that these dynamics from the ancient world are something genetic connected to my person; local memory vs collective memory. I’ll give you an example; the sculpture ‘Ethics of Fire’ reports the meaning of evolution, spiritual transformation, dynamics that are encountered in linguistics with the hieroglyph ‘Alef’, which is nothing other than the matrix of the Greek word ‘alpha’; a word that begins with A, the first letter of the traditional Western alphabet. The way in which mental processes and rhythm has generated this letter over millennia does not make logical sense, but it generates a sound to form spoken words in the contemporary world and is a process analogous to the way I create my best works. Combining unwanted materials in an anatomical emulation that determines a visual language, completely random, but somehow logical to my emotions.”

I enjoy the fact that I cannot view Alberto’s work in isolation. It feels to me like a conversation that builds and is evolving still – as an oeuvre should…the emphasis is on capturing something not achieving something.

“I like to show how I flow more than following how it should flow. I often set my works in places that for some reason are best suited to highlighting their nature…”

This flow is a pertinent topic for me. I have genuine concerns about the integrity of the future of art and knowledge if AI becomes a preferred medium for its perfect and fantastic imagery. If creative play and artistic discovery are reduced to intellect alone, we limit so much potential available to us in more practical methods to learning. When I share my concerns about AI art Alberto articulates,

“I have nothing against technology and society either, but on a creative level I don’t think art can be called as that if completely digital, but I see rather technology as a useful tool, an additional medium or an additional tool for the creative process…

“I don’t believe, no matter how intelligent, that a medium can be an idea.”

“It’s true, many of my best works are defined as better, precisely because I didn’t want to obtain the result that appears, for example. I often leave works unfinished for months and go back to them with different eyes. In the existential cycle, patterns that I know how to recognize recur.”

I talk a lot about resonance in art, but resonance is really just a dynamic of life in general. In a world of billions of people, countless messaging, and a plethora of decisions going on within us and around us in a given moment, both conscious and unconscious, knowing how to register what resonance feels like is important. Connecting with art fosters this experience. Feeling the intention imbued in a piece by its creator is practice for feeling the intention imbued in life by THE creator – whoever or whatever that is. It’s the subtle connections we make from our past that we bring to the present that give it meaning. Like how I came to take my family to Uluru. It wasn’t an isolated incident. The present moment is both everlasting and fleeting, and can seem innocuous sometimes until much later when the impact of that moment is suddenly given new meaning through the acquisition of new information or experiences. Alberto gets this and through a marriage of wit and heart he embodies the message he has been given to send through his art and his life. We are a natural system perfectly attuned to the natural system within which it exists. A babushka doll of life. It’s not necessarily meant to make sense; it is meant to BE sensed.

“I like to capture what the Greeks called ‘Kairos’, which various 19th century painters painted in various ways, gradually defining it as ‘qualitative time’, the nature of the fleeting moment; the true fleeting moment, having already fled, is never experienced.”

Like the death of a star.