Description
“You”. “Something”. “Meet”. These are words that surface from the urban fabric, like a metropolitan instruction, a visual mantra accompanying the anonymous passer-by at the centre of the scene. We are on 7th Avenue, steps away from Times Square: the street sign is still legible, but everything around it has already become something else — layering, vibration, chromatic noise.
Fabrizio Bellanca works on aluminium plate with printing inks and glass colours rolled by hand, building the image through layers and reserves. The metallic surface that emerges between the colours is not a background: it is light, the cold and merciless luminosity of the city that never sleeps. Human figures stand out as silhouettes — someone walking in a hurry, someone handing out flyers, someone moving against the current — while the flow of the metropolis absorbs and erases them at the same time. The giant eye in the upper right watches. Commercial logos overlap with faces. The word “SOMETHING” dominates the lower section as an incomplete, suspended statement — there is something, but what exactly is left for the viewer to decide. It is the deliberate ambiguity of a city that promises everything and explains nothing.
The palette is composed of oranges, deep reds, acid pinks and the flat black of shadows: colours that evoke neon reflected on the wet asphalt of Times Square, that artificial light Bellanca learned to know as a photographer before becoming a painter. The artist processes New York as an image that is at once visual document and emotional abstraction.
