9. Francesco Balsamo (Catania, Italia 1969)
Col Mare Spina Dorsale, 2025
Arazzo | Tapestry
300 x 270 cm
Courtesy: l’artista, Collica & Partners San Gregorio (CT)

Francesco Balsamo (Catania, Italia 1969) is a poet and visual artist who primarily uses drawing as his medium of expression. In recent years, however, his practice has expanded through the introduction of patchwork, giving rise to textile works that retain the emotional intensity and depth of his graphic production while introducing a new sense of lightness. This evolution has rendered his work more accessible and less austere, though it continues to carry a constant lyrical tension and a tragic undercurrent in its thematic explorations.
At the heart of Balsamo’s poetics lies the complex relationship between the challenges of our time and his personal emotional sphere—a lens through which he transforms the contemporary condition into an intimate and universal vision.

9. In Col mare spina dorsale, the richness of velvet and its subtle tone-on-tone variations compose an enveloping underwater scene, where a solitary figure appears suspended in the current. The outstretched arm invites a dual interpretation: it may suggest a fluid, dance-like movement or signal a moment of hesitation—caught between resistance and surrender. Rather than depicting a straightforward struggle for salvation, the figure’s stillness becomes a state of transition, where the boundary between immersion and emergence, between consciousness and unconsciousness, remains deliberately ambiguous.
To complete this scene, Balsamo has embellished the velvet sky with small golden bells. Before sewing them onto the fabric, however, he filled their hollows with clay, rendering them silent. In this gesture, the anticipated chime is annulled, transforming into a silence charged with meaning—not an absence of sound, but rather the sound of silence itself. As if, in order to truly make the sky resonate, one had to mute the bell, its now voiceless echo becomes a deep and muffled pulse, reminiscent of the ocean floor.
The gold of the bells, set against the velvety blue, evokes the star-studded skies of Giotto’s frescoes—vast and suspended above intensely human figures. The bells, hanging like freshly picked fruit, seem to gently fall toward the figure below, creating a music of suspended breath: an eternity on pause, a death postponed through the suspension of sound, which in turn becomes a suspension of time.
Through this poetic construction, Balsamo opens a reflection on the fragility of existential thresholds and the precarious balance between life’s vital tension and the pull of disorientation—a continuous contrast between the pressure of blue descending from above and rising from below