Valter Borsato
Born in Verona in 1962, Valter Borsato started painting around the age of 15: following his instincts and being self-taught, he mostly painted landscapes and figurative works.
Dna cm 70x50, olio su tela
In the seventies he took part in a series of events and competitions. In 1979 and 1980 he organized two personal exhibitions in his hometown. Suddenly, at the age of 22, he stopped painting, because some personal events and new interests - including zoology studies - took the upper hand over art.
Frequenting the Natural History Museum of Turin, in the late 90s, he met the artist Giovanni Boffa, a pupil of F. Casorati, whom he immediately befriended. Thanks to Boffa, Borsato got closer to art and under the supervision and advice of the master (who died in 2017 at the age of 81) he started painting again and doing restoration work, participating between 2017 and 2018 in competitions and group shows. In March 2019 one of his works won a prize in the competition “Mother Earth” (Prato) and in October 2019 some of his paintings were exhibited at the Art shopping of the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris.
A word from the critic
Being one step away from the end and never wanting to grasp its essence as if concluding a journey was to say “end” to one’s own existence!
This can describe in a few lines the pasty brushstroke of the eclectic artist Valter Borsato who for many years, in silence, nourished his expressive path with skill and patience, obtaining a personal interpretative evolution that only now finds meaning and recognition. An evolution that first went by way of a self-taught path, to then seek the contamination of the great twentieth century Italian masters.
A sharp critical ability that often leads to self-harm, a careful search for the intrinsic meaning of the stroke, a metaphysical abstraction, a surreal interpretation of everyday life makes Borsato an artist beyond time. Far from the seductive modern art installations, Borsato proposes a challenging and selective art, in which the canvas and oil colors are the “beasts to be tamed”. In his canvases there is the subtle intelligence of those who do not want to talk about themselves and, in an enigmatic, surreal, elusive way, they leave traces, details, cues to those who, attracted by this sort of role-playing, want to harness it in a modern stereotype without leaving them the privilege of discovering the same. In his canvases at the same time we note the anger of a man who still seeks himself, who is aware of his own being but who shies away from being the expression of a language that evokes the mystery of the game of life. Shyness, anger, passion in a tenacious control of the lines that abandons itself in the end in a tangle of roots that express the need to be always anchored to the present.
Metaphysical? Abstract? Surreal? After all, an artist can do nothing other than let his works speak to an audience that cannot be deceived, nor seduced but only enchanted.
The spell that Borsato has managed to weave with his monocolors, with his capricious abstractions enchant the eyes of those who clamour after the belief that there, outside in their own small garden, often made of loneliness and bitterness, there is someone who dares to paint not only to express themselves, but to interpret the need for the absolute of modern man.
Rita Marchesini, 15 ottobre 2019
