“Caline Dalberto. The Gaze and the Infinite” | May 10 – June 8, 2025
Fatebenefratelli Cultural Center
Valmadrera, Via Fatebenefratelli, 6 – Lecco

In the Scratched series, the sander leads the paintings towards an informal style that almost dialogues with monochrome. The scratch removes the color: Caline seeks the deepest essence of the feelings that dwell in her soul.
In the early works, the gaze allows us to perceive a scenario inspired by the real world.
That evocative Mountain becomes a place to pour dreams, omens, and feelings, translated with the silent language of colors.

The “Sugarloaf”, the “Sacred Mountain” depicted in these works, rises off the coast of Diego Suarez Bay, Caline’s birthplace. Thus, the artist, from birth, coexists with the presence of something inaccessible: a magic that only art can bring back to life.
The simplicity of these paintings is their power. The mountain becomes a Symbol, a metaphor for deep emotions. A mountain understood as an elemental form, reaching towards the sky, only to stop and return (gravity always wins) to the earth. Like a graph of the artist’s emotion, which rises, creates a painting, and then returns to the submerged world of the psyche: with a glance, we can understand Caline’s emotional journey.
It is incredible how a “simple” image of a mountain, portrayed by an inspired artist, can evoke feelings of elevation, respect, and bittersweet melancholy.
These paintings are born from a melancholy linked to memory, towards a Nature seen through the eyes of a child, with a fascination for the World that will never be found again as adults: only Art can make us live this experience of discovery, once more.

The “Scratched” are Caline Dalberto’s most recent paintings, fitting into the highly complex category of “informal”. These works are the offspring of a series of works created in the Tropics, in constant dialogue with Nature. However, this series is born rather from a close dialogue between the artist and the artwork. The artist creates a painting with pure colors, in a completely instinctive manner, but always seeking harmony… and then she engraves it, splits it, violently scratches it with a screwdriver or even with the sander.
There is a passionate element, almost of anger, in these paintings: the search for oneself in the painting links this work to the informal movement, as well as to its being (indeed) “formless”.

Caline carries an extraordinary history of métissage, but this theme is not central to her art: she only knows that her works are the offspring of her history and are linked to that gaze that looks towards the infinite, in a world of pure feelings, which are what truly matter in a human being. Informal artists like Caline tell us “I only paint my hidden impulses”, but precisely for this reason, they are able to better express today’s man, who increasingly feels like a solitary castaway in the storm.
And who perhaps finds in Nature or in Love the only possible consolations.

Text taken from Lorenzo Paolo Messina, 2025, “What the eye has seen, the heart does not forget”. The gaze and the infinite in the art of Caline Dalberto