"Event Horizon is the edge of a black hole and is considered the limit of what we know in terms of laws of physics. After an Event Horizon, the gravity of the black hole sucks in everything from light and matter, so nothing theoretically exists or can survive it. This idea fascinates me because it contains both the destruction of all matter and knowledge but seems to also be connected to what we suspect to be the origin of the universe. I like the idea of this horizon, this limit, this line that separates what we know from what we don’t know and yet contains the possibility of explaining everything that we don’t know.”

 

-Davide Balliano

An event horizon is the edge of a mystery. It cuts a boundary between what can and cannot be known. And here in the interstice Davide Balliano opens novel territory in his paintings and sculptures for the flinty visual tropes he has been developing for nearly a decade. His vocabulary of images and techniques and the ideas that they encapsulate find new striking resonances across time and space. Forms that recur through the plane of paintings are also found in sculptures but in both they are ever unexpectedly terminated and hang mesmerically in a realm between apotheosis and schism.

The undulating meanders of Balliano's paintings are rendered dimensional in Rosso Agadir and Nero Marquinia. (The sculptures are titled for the ancient names of the marble varieties.) Both use a form of two scooping U-shaped concavity. Each stands on two feet, the former on stilts and the latter standing on two mere suggestions and elevated by a concrete foundation.