Angelus ex Aqua: The Exhibition of Gino Baffo’s artworks at the Ships Pavilion

The Angels from the Water are figures emerged from the Venetian Salt Marsh (Barena)

Where the apodictic message they wish to bring to the world surfaces. Their message is powerful but now reduced almost to a mere hum, perhaps now silent and desperate because man no longer knows how to listen, no longer knows how to remember, lives distracted and seduced by the ephemeral.

“To hear, one must have abysses within oneself,” wrote F. Nietzsche, and it is in these intimate waters, salty like the tears of the Bound Angels by the painter Gino Baffo, that never were words translated with such anguish and intensity. This is the reading of the artist’s soul by Maria Luisa Lasala, artistic director and curator of Gino Baffo’s exhibition.

The connection with Nature and the Universe is suspended.

Never as in this historical moment does man’s distance from the Good seem to confirm that the word Humanity no longer identifies even with the human being. The Bound Angels, with bowed heads and sad eyes, aim to be the archetype of the tenderness, love, and compassion that should accompany our growth and our existence on Earth. 

Man and Nature run on the same tracks, yet indifference reigns towards such a symbiosis, the world is destroying itself and man, increasingly fragile and confused by the most insidious materialism, becomes a participant in his own unhealthy sentiments every day. “Art has the duty to bring a Universal message to the human being,” these are the words of the artist Gino Baffo, “Bound Angels was a sudden revelation, a collection of extraordinary works with a loud cry and a warning to all of us.”