Thomas Braida

Born in Gorizia, in 1982. Lives and works in Venice.

Unlike many contemporary meta-paintings characterized by a critical and self-referential discourse on the medium, the so-called “painting about painting”, Braida still wants to attempt to paint the world. He even tries to do it in a new way, despite the fact that the death of painting – above all figurative – has been asserted thousands of times. But he is unafraid of being considered old-fashioned, because he doesn’t care about being in vogue. In essence, he simply cares about painting.

This urgency to re-imagine the real is magmatic material with which the artist risks getting burnt, but at the same time he cannot shirk this role, which he embraced many years ago when he was still a child, influenced to some extent by his father, an art history professor and artist, but above all by Emilio Salgari’s adventure novels, as he recalls “He sparked my imagination. That then degenerated into painting. What was in front of me was never enough: I always pimped reality, making it more appetizing”.

In his works, reality is constantly filtered through his imagination and istinct. Francis Bacon spoke about the painter’s desire “to bring the figurative thing up on to the nervous system more violently”, which Braida develops in these terms: “You absorb reality, the world around us, and you experience it and feel it. Then, when you need to convey it through painting, it becomes a violent gesture, in the sense that it has to be like that because it reveals the world to us with great power – pondered, instinctive, arrogant – that breaks rules and the order with which we perceive the world. And it changes it into something else. Sometimes, even something new.”
The mission of Braida as a painter is one of that takes energy, almost a form of violence, that reverberates on spectators, who are willing to call themselves into question, and on whom it has a cathartic effect. When pathos runs the risk of being excessive, Braida suddenly swerves towards humour, childlike in some cases. And while his painting is filled with references and obsessions, it can even be fun. For example, this is the case of the Pisciatine that, interpreted in various versions, are a leitmotif of his production. But a second later, we plunge back into the abyss of the deepest emotions.

When observing Braida’s works, the spectator perceives deeply rooted, indecipherable ambiguity. Heavylight. It’s that inacessible kernel that makes a work what it is. Because art is not a puzzle to
be solved, but an enigma without a sure answer, just like life itself.

Caroline Corbetta