If a formal rhythm—both mathematical and symbolic—can be said to govern the universe, expressed through patterns that repeat across the micro- and macrocosmos, then Davide Balliano’s work can likewise be seen as a repository of these universal geometries. The practice of the Italian-born, Brooklyn-based artist is driven by an ascetic impulse to contain, within the regularity of such structures, the ever-expanding entropic nature of all things—the chaotic flux of energy and matter that propels continuous transformation and dissolution. Through the rigorous alternation of straight and curved lines, black and white, solids and voids, Balliano produces austere graphic and geometric compositions that unfold into a steady, undulating and ever-multiplying rhythm.
Over time, his work has acquired an autonomous character, evolving within a formal code and grid system that repeats and regenerates itself, deriving logic from its own internal progression. Yet if, at first glance, the austere repetition of Balliano’s programmatic geometrism risks being read as a tautological and self-referential exercise, it is precisely through the subtle introduction of minimal painterly variations that his works articulate a more precise form of timeless classicism: a rhythm that embraces repetition while remaining open to continuous transformation. This process unfolds as an ongoing evolution, deepening into a meditation on the nature of matter—one that yields to flux, embraces accident and accepts the corrosion of utopian perfection as an inevitable condition of transformation and, ultimately, of the evolution of all things.
“I think it comes from a family that always had a strong interior life, intellectual, connected with the true essence of things,” Balliano tells Observer, walking through his Brooklyn studio ahead of the opening of his latest show, “Abacus” at Tina Kim. “I came to the conclusion that my work comes out of an anxious need to control time and space on a limited human scale, which is the scale of a painting, a sheet of paper, whatever it is.”
At first glance, Balliano’s work appears to belong squarely within a lineage of geometric abstraction that runs from the Bauhaus’s most rigorous rationalist and mathematical ambitions—finding their climax in Max Bill—to the near-erasure of subjectivity pursued by American minimalism’s economy of means, epitomized by Frank Stella’s reduction of painting to its most essential formal and spatial terms. In this lineage, abstraction is governed by internal logic rather than experience, encapsulated in the dictum “what you see is what you see.”
Yet this apparent continuity quickly fractures under closer scrutiny. In Balliano’s work, the late-modernist ideals of purity, monotony and serial repetition are persistently unsettled by a constellation of “accidents”: uncontrolled drips of color, scars and abrasions that interrupt the system. “They bring in an element of nature: gravity, physicality,” he explains, identifying forces that reintroduce the body into an otherwise mechanical structure. “With this impulse toward precision, the drop clashes with the fact that ideal precision isn’t human, which I think is another very important element in my work.”
In that sense, his relationship with the canvas appears far closer to that of an artist such as Robert Ryman, particularly in his insistence on investigating not what to paint, but how to paint. What is at stake is a sustained meditation on the act of painting itself—on the physical encounter with the surface and on the nature of matter as an active participant in the work. Painting becomes a site of inquiry where process, duration and material shape the outcome as much as intention.
This attentiveness to material presence also resonates with the practice of Ellsworth Kelly, especially in Kelly’s understanding of color and form as autonomous realities rather than expressive devices. Like Kelly, Balliano approaches the painted surface as a field in which form and color emerge from a direct engagement with perception and material fact, stripped of symbolism or narrative projection. Color, here, is not descriptive or emotive but operates as pure matter—something encountered, measured and experienced in space.
What emerges is not a rejection of geometric abstraction but its contemporary recalibration—its recontextualization within a lineage of mystical and contemplative practices that, across time, have used artistic and automatic processes to connect with eternal forms of order. For Balliano, painting is a disciplined, repetitive process—an embodied inquiry into the relationship between matter and its maker, where control and surrender coexist, and where meaning arises through sustained interaction rather than representation. The interruption of mechanical precision forces Balliano’s abstract compositions to exist within a biological dynamic, bringing them back into the realm of life, temporality and the human condition.
“In all appearance, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out toward a clearing,” Marcel Duchamp wrote during a period when he was particularly close to theosophical thought. The phrase resonates with Balliano’s approach. “I see it as a continuous flow, without consciousness—or rather, the consciousness of a universe understood as a subject that does not yet know itself, rather than as an omnipotent figure that wakes up, decides for us, and has already decided what it needs to be,” he reflects. “It’s instead a loop: we try to understand ourselves, it understands itself through us, and in that mutual process, everything turns back on itself, moving in a continuous circle.”
Often created during extended marathons of rigorous, meditative and contemplative practice, Balliano’s repeating structures emerge as a rhythm and a symbol of the transformation of figure into principle. This tension between the seemingly irrational flux of matter and the invisible mathematical order of serial repetition finds its clearest articulation in Balliano’s signature arc forms, which suggest both continuity and measured progression in their potentially endless reconfigurations. In the new works at Tina Kim, however, Balliano introduces a different kind of interruption: actual white space introduces a pause akin to silence within a musical composition.
“At a certain point, the symmetry of the composition started to bother me,” Balliano explains. If the repeated serpentine form remained grounded in movement within a determined spatial logic, the introduction of a more absolute interruption and off-centering lends the compositions a new weight and stillness. “The forms are more static, more still within their own dynamic. They almost seem to anchor themselves to the earth.”
Balliano further disrupts his rigorously monochromatic black-and-white palette with a deep, blood-like red alongside an even more earthy, rust-toned orange, which appears here for the first time in a dominant way, covering entire surfaces. The result is an intensified architectural presence and an expanded sense of monumentality: a gravitas that grants these minimal geometric compositions renewed atemporality.
This new and more synthetic composition initially existed at a much smaller scale on a square canvas. As is his habit, Balliano left the sketch in the studio for several weeks, living with it before beginning in earnest, but the composition never fully convinced him at that size. It was only when he imagined enlarging it dramatically that the work began to resolve itself. “At that scale, it cuts the space in a completely different way; it felt beautifully monolithic to me.”
Notably, both the colors and the formal vocabulary of these works resonate with a distinctly Italian architectural vernacular, one Balliano likely absorbed during his upbringing and later reactivated in Mexico, where it found an echo in the timelessness of pre-Columbian architecture. Renaissance and pre-Columbian structures, despite their temporal and geographical distance, share the pursuit of eternal and monolithic forms. In the visible tension between structure and dissolution within these interrupted serial forms, the compositions acquire monumentality through the provisional concentration of order into a crystallized state.
Tellingly, most of Balliano’s decisions on canvas emerge through the artistic process itself, as he embraces his role as a medium for reflections within and beyond himself. “Over the past year, I thought a lot about entropy—about the tendency of time, space and things to move toward chaos, toward disorder,” he says. “In my work, this emerges especially as a desire to break a pattern, to disrupt the module that structures the work. But within that desire to break, there’s almost a twin desire for harmony. It’s as if this need to break the general scheme still comes with a demand that the new dissonance be reabsorbed into a larger harmony—which, for me, is when the work really works.”
It is within these fractures that Balliano opens the possibility of moving beyond conventional modes of representation toward new harmonic structures of order, capable of balancing the precision of graphic systems with forces that disrupt them: scratches, drips and abrasions that erode the surface. This is a search for harmony within the chaos of the material world, one that begins from chaos rather than denying it.
“It’s more about the ascetic rigor of arriving at the essential,” Balliano argues. “My work grows out of this conviction that the link with one’s interior life, and the effort to understand oneself, are essential to identity: this is what allows a person to contribute to evolution, to the contemporary conversation,” he states, arguing, “This can take many forms, such as the work of a scientist or writing. For me, it takes the form of an artistic practice.”
Balliano’s work can be productively understood within a lineage of artists once considered esoteric, such as Hilma af Klint, as well as early avant-garde figures who challenged rational materialism, locating meaning not in representation but in the act of making itself. In these practices, the image emerges through the artist rather than from the artist, giving rise to abstraction, automatism and visionary imagery as tools for accessing a dimension of temporality that extends beyond the individual, connecting instead to enduring structural orders. This reflects a form of intelligence not positioned above us, but already embedded within existence itself, unfolding across multiple planes—physical, astral, mental and spiritual—most of which remain invisible to ordinary perception, yet can be rendered visible through art.
This deepest existential and philosophical inquiry behind Balliano’s practice now finds an even more lucid expression in his works on paper, presented here for the first time. Long considered by the artist as studies or sites of freer experimentation, these works gained new significance during a period of withdrawal and concentrated effort in Mexico, where working on paper opened a different form of immediacy and a new temporal rhythm. “In the paintings—between thinking it and making it—there’s always a shift,” he reflects. “Here I could play with color as material with another immediacy.”
Through layered gouache passages and a calibrated balance between control and improvisation, color becomes a living matter to work with rather than something merely applied, unfolding as a negotiation between intention and emergence that manifests in the moment of making. Bringing these works together introduces a form of unveiling: the pictorial structure becomes visible, as is the process Balliano has long pursued.
The introduction of words into his compositions appears as a new articulation between sense and reason, intuition and control. Balliano long resisted integrating words into paintings, where their gravitational pull toward meaning risked imposing narrative too forcefully. In drawings, however, language operates differently. Because the compositions are lighter and less imposing, words can function structurally, almost architecturally, without overwhelming the visual field. “What interests me about words in the drawings is that I feel them as almost the only figurative element in the drawing,” he explains. “They’re like a third element: you have the base element, which is the graphic structure, then you have the color and its texture, and once you have these first two elements, there’s the thought suggested by the word, which generates an image. Still, this is not a description of what you’re looking at.”
It is interesting to note how, perceptually, these works replicate the dynamics of an optometrist’s test: isolated figures that gradually compress, compelling the viewer to look more closely and decipher letters and words emerging from what initially appears as an abstract composition. The works on paper articulate a space in which material, structure and thought coexist, each maintaining autonomy while informing the others. Conceptually, they map the relationship between sensory perception and cognitive processing, demonstrating how language intervenes to redirect sensation toward meaning. After all, language itself remains humanity’s most conventional yet inherently arbitrary system for ordering the entropic nature of the universe.
“Words come last for me; they’re never decided in advance. I usually begin with the graphic structure, and depending on that structure, I realize that I’m looking for a word of one, two, three, four, or five letters,” Balliano clarifies. Yet the color material flowing into these pre-established structures follows its own logic, evoking the slow formation of rust and binding potentially atemporal mathematical systems to the temporal perspective from which they can be experienced. In this way, Balliano’s art stages a fundamental tension between rational construction and material contingency, where abstraction no longer operates as a self-sufficient system but as a porous ground and conceptual framework in which the aspiration toward perfected harmony and the ascetic discipline required to attune to a universal order are continually tested.
—Elisa Carollo
