Description
In Urban Nature III – Como, darkness is matter, physical presence, the silent protagonist that holds everything else together. The trunks rise like columns of a nave-less cathedral — black, compact, motionless — while above, the canopy opens into a dense and articulated texture that the hand-brushed aluminium transforms into a cold, almost lunar light. It is the backlight of a forest seen from below, that effect one only knows by standing still, in silence, looking up towards the sky through the trees.
Bellanca works here with a palette of deep blues, violets and near-absolute black. It is a glimpse of Como on one of those afternoons when the light disappears before you have had time to grow accustomed to its absence. The artist layers printing inks over glass colours with broad, controlled gestures, building depth upon depth until creating that sensation of being inside the forest rather than observing it from outside. Certain elements remind the viewer that we are in a city, that this woodland is not wild, that nature and the urban here coexist — and that Bellanca, as always, is telling the story of both together. The horizontal format (60×90 cm) amplifies the sense of landscape, of panorama, of a gaze that extends sideways searching for a way out between the trunks.
