Description
A tree occupies the centre of the scene with its black, massive trunk, almost like an architectural column, while the branches break into thin, nervous marks. Around it, the city: backlit figures in the background, a railing, the silhouettes of passers-by walking through Como.
In Urban Nature I – Como, Bellanca takes to its extreme consequences the tension that runs through all his research: that between nature and urban, between organic and artificial, between the slow mark of a growing tree and the frantic rhythm of the city surrounding it. The word URBAN surfaces on the right side of the work, as if it were part of the chromatic fabric — a Letraset element dissolving into the ink. Lacquer red burns against deep black in vertical flares along the central trunk, while the hand-brushed aluminium emerges in wide areas of cold light — the left canopy of the tree, the sky, the ground covered in minute leaves that Bellanca has built with almost obsessive patience, mark after mark. It is a surface that reads differently at different distances: from afar it is a landscape; up close it is a universe of gestures, layers, overlapping. The vertical format — 100×70 cm — amplifies the verticality of the tree in a work that carries with it the physicality of the place — the Como lakefront, the tree-lined avenues, the grey light of January — yet translates it into something universal.
