| This Italian (Spanish-born) artist is investigating a delicate field but, through the combination of technique and knowledge of its subject matter, he manages not to fall into vulgarity and obscenity. For many years, the painter has been developing a personal research focused on the rite of passage from childhood to youth that is characterised by a blurred identity. In this time of life, sexually, the body is undergoing a substantial change, but it is far from being adult. This sudden and short-lasting condition is the challenge that the artist’s painting attempts to recreate through an ample vision of the characters’ conditions. |  |
Cesare Biratoni – Maria Paola Mosca
This Italian (Spanish-born) artist is investigating a delicate field but, through the combination of technique and knowledge of its subject matter, he manages not to fall into vulgarity and obscenity. For many years, the painter has been developing a personal research focused on the rite of passage from childhood to youth that is characterised by a blurred identity. In this time of life, sexually, the body is undergoing a substantial change, but it is far from being adult. This sudden and short-lasting condition is the challenge that the artist’s painting attempts to recreate through an ample vision of the characters’ conditions.
Previously, he put his efforts into realizing a rich portfolio of large portraits of boys and girls modeling for an imaginary camera—questioning, through this choice of subject matter, the ambiguities of the age group in which the individual is not a child anymore, but not an adult yet. Recently, Biratoni has been deepening this vision—of preferring fictional and fleeting sceneries to a single character’s portrait in an undefined setting. Typically, his attempt is always to hint at atmospheres and situations rather than to completely define them and, in his more recent production, he is expanding on this aspect in order to realise more intimate visions. However, the artist lingers on the settings for his characters in a reduced format in order to strengthen the affirmation of his new interest in pondering atmospheres.
Even if Biratoni has recently been showing a more spatial approach to the work, his peculiar modus operandi confirms his will to leave the line between his young boys and girls and adults blurred and indefinite. We are asked to fill in the white spaces and to sharpen the images through our own sensation/impression. Besides the small, painted settings, Biratoni is also producing a limited series of portraits of charming young characters that are related to the whole body of his work since they almost invite the spectator in to take a closer look at the ambiguous sceneries. They posses an intense, ironic and magnetic sight even though they are traced—as well as the other characters—in a blurred, almost offhanded way. We do not make a mistake in considering Biratoni’s painting an instinctual response to a natural stimulus that is then pondered, questioned and put together on the canvas.
Through the colours and the immediate paintbrush marks, Biratoni on the one hand confronts the joy of growing up—the fragility and energy of delicate bodies playing in, but also dominating spaces with their naive aura. On the other hand, the spectator must also confront a certain anxiety in facing the ambiguous images that bring up a range of senses and emotions—confusion, lightness, curious findings, ambiguity and discretion—they must question the possibility of an ideal, endless state of innocence.
