GIACOMO BALLA - SPEED LINE + LANDSCAPE + NOISE - 1913
"Everything moves, everything runs, everything turns rapidly. A figure is never stable in front of us, but appears and disappears incessantly. Due to the persistence of the images on the retina, things in motion are deformed, following one another, like vibrations, in space that run ", Balla subscribes to the futurist painting of 1910 in the manifesto.
Always in search of a synthesis, Balla develops the pictorial theme through countless analyzes: starting from various particular studies (relative motion, the flight of swallows, the interpenetration of light, the dynamism of the car) he arrives at the "line of speed", he himself defined the fundamental basis of my thought forms. It is no coincidence that there are two notebooks where Balla develops the speed line in more than 55 studies, joining it with other factors (the vortex, the landscape, the noise). We are in 1913: this line, schematic and abstract, will appear in the Sicilian magazine "La Balza" as a synthetic study of a speed line born from the passage of the car in the landscape.
Sometimes, the Balla line combines other factors: the hills of the landscape, the spiral of the vortex, the swastikas of noise, the strength of the rhythm ... finally it is also realized with other themes: it becomes the subject of the "plastic complexes" and of the filiform sculpture in space, it extends to the architectural project, is applied to the furniture in the extraordinary screen of Casa Balla and goes around the world through postal art.
As regards the theme, the work in question here comes close to the great collage Ponte della Velocita defined by E.Crispolti "project of futurist architecture".
The work comes from the family of the sculptor Enrico Quattrini, an old friend of the Balla family since the 1930s, so his daughter Elica remembers the meetings with the Quattrini: "he lived in a villa in San Pancrazio". At the Quattrini's, after visiting the studio and admiring the last works of the old sculptor, we went under the pergola to have a snack. Quattrini was a very good engraver.
The work "velocity line + landscape + noise" from around 1913, made with colored pastels on heavy paper, measures 38 x 57.5 cm, with the bottom left sign: BALLA.
25.05.2021
Always in search of a synthesis, Balla develops the pictorial theme through countless analyzes: starting from various particular studies (relative motion, the flight of swallows, the interpenetration of light, the dynamism of the car) he arrives at the "line of speed", he himself defined the fundamental basis of my thought forms. It is no coincidence that there are two notebooks where Balla develops the speed line in more than 55 studies, joining it with other factors (the vortex, the landscape, the noise). We are in 1913: this line, schematic and abstract, will appear in the Sicilian magazine "La Balza" as a synthetic study of a speed line born from the passage of the car in the landscape.
Sometimes, the Balla line combines other factors: the hills of the landscape, the spiral of the vortex, the swastikas of noise, the strength of the rhythm ... finally it is also realized with other themes: it becomes the subject of the "plastic complexes" and of the filiform sculpture in space, it extends to the architectural project, is applied to the furniture in the extraordinary screen of Casa Balla and goes around the world through postal art.
As regards the theme, the work in question here comes close to the great collage Ponte della Velocita defined by E.Crispolti "project of futurist architecture".
The work comes from the family of the sculptor Enrico Quattrini, an old friend of the Balla family since the 1930s, so his daughter Elica remembers the meetings with the Quattrini: "he lived in a villa in San Pancrazio". At the Quattrini's, after visiting the studio and admiring the last works of the old sculptor, we went under the pergola to have a snack. Quattrini was a very good engraver.
The work "velocity line + landscape + noise" from around 1913, made with colored pastels on heavy paper, measures 38 x 57.5 cm, with the bottom left sign: BALLA.
25.05.2021