About

Caline Dalberto was born and raised in Madagascar and trained as an artist between France, Guadeloupe, and Italy, where she currently lives and works.
Her style evokes a sense of rebellion and timeless nostalgia, especially for Madagascar — the land she was forced to leave during adolescence. That departure, both physical and emotional, remains a central thread in her artistic expression.

For Caline, painting is a physical act of liberation, an urgent need to reconnect with the inner landscapes that continue to inhabit her. For this reason, her work is often perceived as raw, visceral, and at times animistic — an echo of the earthly and spiritual dimensions of the environments that shaped her first perceptions of the world.

Caline has held several solo exhibitions in Italy, particularly in the Lake Como area, where her work continues to be exhibited.

Biography

I was born on December 3 in a military hospital in Diégo Suarez, in the north of Madagascar. My hometown is situated on the largest bay in the world. At the time, it was the largest military base in the Indian Ocean.
For this reason, the Allied forces launched a battle to capture it and prevent the Japanese Empire from seizing it.
I was born during the hot and humid period, the rainy and cyclone season during the southern summer. I was born on December 3.

My childhood was marked by intense contrasts: the sweetness and violence of the climate intertwined with the serenity of the Malagasy people. The animist culture, tribal dances, songs, and sacred places, the “Fady“, welcomed me and became rooted in my being. And then the animals: lemurs, chameleons, crocodiles, fossa. The tropical fruits filled my palate. All of this is part of me.

The Malagasy people do not know Time: life does not hold the value of a future. One dies for nothing, because the land offers little and nothing can be accumulated. Birth and death are equivalent: everything is written in destiny.

Yet, between the cult of the dead and rebirth, life pulses with its own wisdom. Why, then, worry?

My mother belonged to an aristocratic Norman family. Her father, an agronomist engineer, was in Madagascar to specialize in tropical plants. Her cousin, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, an engineer and aviation pioneer, invented the control stick: a small gesture for the world, but enough to merit having a crater on the Moon named after him.

My maternal grandfather, Raymond Esnault, arrived in Madagascar at 28 and married my grandmother, of Basque origin. It was in Sambava, in the vanilla-growing area, that my mother was born.

My father, of Piedmontese father and Réunionnaise mother, was tall, austere, and elegant. His father, Eugenio, founded “Le Comptoir Eugène Dalberto” in 1902 and, together with Maréchals Gallieni and Joffre, contributed to the infrastructure of Diégo-Suarez.

At that time, Diégo-Suarez was experiencing its golden era: the naval forces of three nations crossed paths in the port, among ships, sailors, high-ranking officers, and diplomats. The gala evenings at the Naval Club lit up the city. It was there that my grandfather Eugenio met my grandmother, Léonie Robert, a beautiful Creole born in Saint-Benoît de la Réunion. Léonie was of noble lineage, with traces of mixed heritage in her blood—the same that runs in mine. They had four children. My father, with dark skin and Indian features, was captured by the British during World War II and interned in Namibia, in a camp for African prisoners. I feel I have lived an intense and interesting life.

In the tropics, there was so much beauty: nature, everything around me was a palette of colors. I was imbued with scents, smells, poetry—a dream immersed in a harsh reality. And this is what shaped me.
Leaving my land was devastating. Not a day goes by without my gaze, within me, resting on the beauty of Sugarloaf, the sacred mountain Fady, in the bay of Diégo. I think of it, its real name Nosy Lonja, a holy and respected place: no one can approach, for a King rests upon that mountain. I think of Anivorano, the Sacred Lake populated by crocodiles, a place of ancient ritual sacrifices. I remember hunting at dusk, on the beach, to catch crabs that would become a good soup. And those sunsets so beautiful that you would want to die with them, to be reborn the next day, with a dawn so bright as to promise a fairytale day.

I only know that, despite the years passed and the many countries I have lived in—even the four years in Guadeloupe and Saint-Martin, where I felt at home—I belong to the land where my mother left the placenta, as the Malagasy proverb says. My heart is there. I paint my suffering, the distance from that island in the middle of the Indian Ocean where my essence was born.