THE CRITICS

Milo Bianca is an artist from Treviso. As a young man, he first attended the atelier of Giulio Ettore Erler and, later on, Carlo De Roberto’s and Toni Benetton’s. Therefore his formation is a result of a direct involvement in ‘making’ art. His frequent attendance at collective and personal exhibitions and his first production attest an initial approach to naturalism, which is quite typical of a Veneto artist. His artistic path was linear, following the evolution of Italian and foreign art into contemporary art, starting from the fifties.

The collocation of his works in Italian and foreign collections witnesses the singularity of his artistic production. Moreover, the artist, raised in a domestic environment, in which art was constantly present, enjoyed the possibility of enriching his personality, of absorbing, digesting, meditating on a method and a vision of the real. We should underline how the artist is not afraid of confronting himself with memories and historic places: for example museums where works by Arturo Martini, Umberto Moggioli, Gino Rossi, Teodoro Wolf Ferrari are present: artists that are examples of a figurative culture that characterized the whole century. Milo Bianca has faced different stylistic suggestions and absorbing atmospheres, elegant chromatic compositions, impulsive gestures but, above all, since the seventies, he has focused on a reassessment of Expressionism sometimes leaning towards the most representative French artists of this current. Thanks to these artists, he has found (out) the value and the taste for colour, inborn in him: a sense of colour that balances shades and tones, able to evoke particular atmospheres. Spaces are created with a few signs and soft colours, in which we can find a suggestion of the infinity of space and the rarefaction of light in a continuous, almost pounding, breaking down and re-composing of the subjects. At a certain point Milo Bianca shifts from a naturalistic representation to an intensive use of colours, by means of which the image is interpreted by matter itself taking shape on the canvas. The artist gets closer and closer to abstractionism. Starting from the nineties, we can say that the stylistic conclusion he gets to, is directed towards a recovery of sign and colour that enable him to carry out a more emotional vision. The result is a union between music and painting, essential to his art. Therefore, the reference to Kandinskij becomes (therefore) quite natural. “The value of light and bright green, of white, black, carmine red and ochre, is underlined. These are impressions that become palpable elements getting in touch with other emotions, such as the ones arising from music and from the interconnections between music and painting.”.What stands out from his works at first sight is a positive feeling of sweetness and sensuousness. Like Kandinskij he seems to announce a conclusive message on his art. “ I’m dreaming of a balanced and quiet art, without disturbing and alarming elements: a soothing example, a sedative for the brain for every intellectual, for all of us, …”. Sign and colour take an important aesthetic function, thanks to the union between visual and listening sensibility and the translation of images on canvas. One of Bianca’s most original results is the diminution of his perception of a keen sensibility, aimed at the reproduction of emotions on a flat space where he manages to express himself freely. So, suddenly, in the nineties, Milo Bianca is dazzled by music and engages himself in its representation: his anxiety for knowledge seems almost appeased in the interpretation of the fundamental emotions raised by music, where his own feelings and sensations are recorded on the canvas, with brushes and colours as well as a deep and incredible sensitivity acquired through media. To get to these results the paths are two: one musical and the other artistic. The musical is the product of a visceral passion for music, especially for jazz, one of the most difficult genres, resulting from the combination of situation and feelings. Only those trained to listen to this kind of sonorities are able to appreciate this kind of music; jazz is like Hermetic poetry: the sound, or the ensemble of sounds, is made up of an exclusion of what is superfluous and unnecessary to create a harmony. Very often, our assessment corresponds to our capacity to get the musical message resulting from the harmony of sounds created by different instruments, but jazz takes away everything that is natural for our sensibility; for an ordinary sensibility. What Bianca does is to express himself with the essential, translating sensations and emotions into images, using strong and unexpected tones with fast and snappy gestures and bright and sensational colours : black, blue, green; softer colours being, instead, applied to the representation of deeper emotions conveying sweetness and calm. In the last fifteen years, Milo Bianca tried to interpret emotions and translate pictorially on the canvas feelings aroused by the music of contemporary composers. The artist himself tells us how this occurs “the relationship between my works and music is not the translation, through signs, colours and materials, of the different themes and rhythmical performances, but comes out of a spontaneous improvisation, resulting from the listening of music and my deep love for nature”. In this way, Bianca portrays the suggestions and the turmoil stirred in him by Olivier Messiaen’s Le catalogue des oiseaux and goes deeper into the pictorial interpretations of 20th century music, such as the compositions by Richard Strauss, Anton Webern, Antonio Casella, Sofia Gobaidulina, Pierre Boulez, Giacinto Scelsi, Morton Feldman, John Cage and Giusto Pio. His new way of conceiving painting, as an art that follows the demands of contemporary culture, is, for him, a new conquest and a new affirmation of the evolution of art and culture, even if Milo Bianca is conscious of tradition and, starting from his knowledge and techniques, has been able to carry out a real evolution in his painting. For this reason the path he covers is bringing him to a firm use of different techniques even informal, where his tones suggest musical movements. His works need to be looked at from a specific perspective and according to this declared purpose. We can observe, then, his evolution from figurative, naturalistic painting, to abstract art, close to abstract neo expressionism. The evolution was neither easy nor accidental, but gradual, motivated and regenerative. Every artist, in fact, in his deep, is moved by a desire to experiment new paths and, at (in) the same time, to give new experiences to the public, to present something positively new: (,) every progression has a reason. It’s not a research for the sake of novelty, rather it is an incentive to take a quicker path towards more concrete, practicable ideals . We recognize that Milo Bianca has achieved his purpose, even though his art can sometimes seem not easy to understand, needing consideration and concentration, as it has been for the painter himself, who didn’t get to the result straightaway, but after long and difficult experiences. Bianca asks the observer to get into the idea expressed in the picture, in order to fully understand the meaning of the atmospheres he creates, elaborates and enriches with shapes and chromaticisms and sometimes by means of collages. Besides, modern and contemporary art enables the viewers to add their own feelings to the ones expressed by the artist, thus becoming co-creator of the artist’s works. In this context Milo Bianca’s optimism is evident and reflects his sensibility and his outgoing personality that permeate all of his works. In this way our watching can go deeper into the artist’s intimacy and let us have a share of his creations. Bianca is not afraid of revealing his inner world. On the contrary he represents it with harmonic series made of shapes and colours, in images that create the original atmospheres typical of the artist, a very personal style where the elements of composition and technique give the whole structure intrinsic, engaging shape. Therefore character, shape and meaning of his expressive development are given by that peculiar intertwining of picture and feelings typical of his sharp sensibility towards the colours and the sounds of matter and spirit which, transferred onto canvas, marks the story of an artist and his artistic production.

September 12th 2011
Mario Guderzo