Davide Balula
Born in Annecy, 1978 and lives in Paris and New York
Working with various media including sound, installation, and drawing, Davide Balula explores the nature of events and correlations. He often allows the effects of deterioration to compose the visual surface of his paintings. For example, to make his River Paintings he abandons canvases in a riverbed for various amounts of time, allowing them to gather sediments, grown algae, and mould. Within the same field of research he has created Burnt Paintings where he burns the picture frame then rubs it on another canvas to create a negative image. He also has a series of Artificially Aged Paintings (wet/dry/wet/dry) conceived following the artist’s collaboration with a fabricator of climatic chambers, which reproduce the effects of erosion. To create the work, primed canvas is submitted to a series of conditions reflecting different temperature cycles: hot, cold, humidity, etc, which simulate accelerated weather fluctuations that effect work over time. Time and context are central concerns for Balula, each a unit in a long chain of experiences.
