Life

The work

Mixed media, glued cork and white gold leaf, 180 cm x 200 cm.

Exhibited at the Pieve di Romena and the Castello dei Conti Guidi in Poppi, Arezzo.

The idea

I have never felt alone in the woods, always in good company, cocooned by so much energy. It is a mysterious and magical place. During my long walks here, I developed the desire to create a work that would enhance light and shadow, silence and sound.

In certain months of the year, when the sun is lower, sharp, long shadows are cast, creating shapes and patterns on the tree trunks. This gave me my inspiration.

The technique

I used all my experience and skills acquired over time to create it, even though I did not know what the final effect would be, despite having a sketch on paper that I had drawn a long time ago. A painted bas-relief made with corks cut into different sizes, a light material that I treated with plaster and glue.The inclusion of small sheets of white gold was not planned, it was a lucky coincidence that adds a sense of magic to the work. Looking at it, I am reminded of Della Robbia's ceramic bas-reliefs. A saying that is dear to me, to give birth.

"The sea in the woods"

A critique of the work Life by Roberta Fiorini

Light, air, water, in that inseparable and empathetic bond between white and blue, which have always been his preferred palette. The rippling waves or trails of sea foam and, on the horizon, dotted with stars, from which the optical dance between shadow silhouettes and shining forms comes to life in an uninterrupted becoming, such that now the sea and the forest are interwoven with the same reflections in an enchantment that Bianchini produces on the immense and moving surface of his most recent great journey: “Life”!
It was a brilliant intuition to create a material fabric, resistant and light like cork, in a dense weave, to make the surface itself three-dimensional, which, in welcoming the meticulous yet extensive painting, accentuates the perception of a vibrant vision until it almost seems as if you can hear the air and the wind rustling the branches of the trees that form the backdrop and infinity.
A work that marks another important milestone in the long and very coherent artistic journey of Andrea Bianchini's art: as always, a vivid and pulsating image, in fact it is ‘Life’ that glows with golden reflections in the dark, in a masterful balance between abstraction and figurativeness, between realism and symbolism. On the tree trunks, in the blue streaks of the moving shadows on the whiteness in which they rise, faces and masks appear
only to disappear again into the overall view, fleeting encounters, magical as is the very nature of the forest, with a fairy-tale physicality.

Roberta Fiorini