Biography
Henry Ballate
Statement
The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element
or side to them irrespective of subject matter.
Lucian Freud
I was born in the midst of chaos and confusion; it was already past “White on White” and someone had already proclaimed that there was nothing more to paint. I was born after the second “urinal.”
I work in an art form that deals with past and present, from the museum to the screen, mixing traditional methods of painting with the implementation of innovative techniques, giving birth to new works that are rooted in art history.
My Fragments are stimulated from the passion of one artist to another showing a wide range of influences, including sources from the Renaissance to contemporary artists. Many of these works were the pornography of my childhood, and still today I look at them with the same curiosity.
My process starts with a collage made with the use of a computer. Observing works of art on the computer gives me the possibility of walking into a piece and stop where it provokes and excites me. The ideal model has already been created and has eternal form. I rape it, I use it and destroy it purely for aesthetic reasons, recovering and bringing it out from the darkness, releasing it from its Baroque frame and putting it into contemporary context.
Today’s technological advances have shortened our attention spans and my art reflects and even celebrates that reality. Technology has also given me the opportunity to contemplate these works in private; to possess, to penetrate and to make them mine.
