Andrea Bettin: Art for Freedom, Art as Freedom
Eddie Weinberg
Andrea Bettin, Underwater 1, oil on canvas, 2004.
Andrea Bettin is a man living a double life. While at work as an engineer, his mind is always on art, what he feels is his true purpose. And yet, Bettin’s art seems to borrow from his scientific background, or else work within its context–exploring life’s peculiarities, attending to the details of nature.
Bettin’s work, inventively contemporary in its appearance, is also respectful of its roots. Bettin cites such giants as Picasso, Schiele, Rodin, Modigliani, Pollock and Klee as key influences in the development of his style. In his latest paintings one can begin to see a distinct dichotomy between his more classically inspired portraits and his "Freedom" series.
At a recent exhibition at the Broadway Gallery in New York, Bettin displayed studies of models, his wife, himself. These portraits are earthy: passive actors are sketched in natural tones; bright points of tension resonate from their faces, in their shoulders. In each face, one may glimpse an action contemplated and abandoned. The self-portraits appear pensive, resolved, and contain the threat of sudden violence, sudden change. Perhaps they reveal the conflict that exists between the engineer’s understanding of reality and the artist’s sense of possibility.
The abstract, scratchy and verdant pieces that comprise the "Freedom" series may also be seen as a form of self-portraiture. These, Bettin says, are metaphoric examples of his "unconscious mind breaking free." Within each colorful and chaotic painting, one can detect the traces of birds or fish or vegetation. Bettin represents his creatures in bright bursts of motion; each animal’s presence amid the fertile colorful surroundings appears as a sunspot. The paintings seem to be living things, struggling against and united by the currents that move along the canvases’ surfaces. These works escape definition for they are constantly in flux. They are movement, change.
Bettin explains that this series will continue to grow as an ongoing project. He plans to exhibit these paintings in a multimedia installation. Images of birds will be displayed next to empty birdcages, fish next to aquariums. Bettin’s next entry in the series is set to be his most daring. He plans to exhibit replicas of prison cells from Guantanemo Bay, and juxtapose them with images of free human beings.
These raw paintings of oil, acrylic, watercolor, and fabric reveal Bettin’s hunger. He wants to be a full-time artist, and this series opposes the rigidity of the engineering profession. But perhaps these paintings are also the experiments of a scientist struggling with a world he must understand more fully. Bettin also comments on the collectability of art, something once fresh and wet now fixed to the dull, crowded walls of its admirers, sealed off from the life it depicts.
This is a predicament Bettin understands well. "For contemporary art, Italy is not a good place," Bettin says. Perhaps this is a product of the country’s rich artistic history, and the reduced wall space that can be allotted to new art. There are only a few contemporary art galleries, and Bettin feels "they are like a small club." He cites the example of Maurizio Cattelan, a contemporary artist who is currently enjoying great success outside of Padua, the region where both he and Bettin are from.
Bettin hasn’t let these difficulties hamper him. He spent a year-and-a-half in Scotland and was most recently in Cote d’Azure where he spent a summer near the beach, selling art to appreciative tourists. He describes these experiences as influential both to his art and to his identity as an artist. In Cote d’Azure, where he split his art-selling time between the gallery and the street, he was warmly embraced by the public and free of the more restrictive conditions accompanying the business of art in his native country. This has given him the freedom to be more the painter he wants to become, freedom "to deal with concepts outside of the mainstream."
Freedom is of central importance to Bettin. It is the capacity to give everything of oneself, in work, in art, in life. Freedom should be the birthright of every living thing, and Bettin uses his art to explore why it isn’t and what can be done about it.
