Mario Ballocco

A strong intellectual tension, a tenacious demonstrative will appear to direct Ballocco's entire pictorial experience. In fact, each of his works stems from an expressly stated theoretical hypothesis, starting from which the author intends to analyze, from time to time, perceptual, communicative and emotional problems regarding color. The relationships established between color and form represent, as it is easy to guess, the hinge around which his painting revolves; they are for Ballocco a tool for acquiring new knowledge that can be subsequently spent in the context of the collective interest. The artist is believed to be the inventor of chromatology, an interdisciplinary methodology that finds application in the various fields of social life: he is responsible for numerous proposals concerning, for example, the color of work and study environments, that of ambulances, that of notebooks used in schools. The relationship between art and science, one of the most stimulating themes among those that characterized the culture of the 20th century, has one of its key figures in Ballocco, who must also be credited with having shown the irreplaceable nature of painting. in solving problems of visual logic. Coplanarity, chromatic interaction, figural induction, contrast effects are - as noted by Angela Vettese - the main visual phenomena on which her painting has focused, represented here by an experience of reversibility obtained through a refined superposition of different chromatic planes.