John Balistreri  Beyond the Boiler

John Balistreri’s current exhibition at Riverhouse Arts falls at the intersection of several of the artist’s currents of thought, an intersection which oddly lands within the hazy boundaries of Futurism.  The title Beyond the Boiler is briefly explained by a reminiscence of the artist of his time as a youth maintaining and repairing boilers that were components of his family’s greenhouse business.  His words are full of an appreciation and excitement for technology:

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 As the water turned to steam, the steel header hammered and the whole place warmed up. It was visceral, primeval, it felt alive, and I understood it. That boiler is still in my bones when I walk into the studio.

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The seething, breathing energy of the machine that so captivated Matinetti, Boccioni, Balla, and Carrà seems similarly to be a foundational aspect of Balistreri’s practice, minus the kooky right-wing politics.  Balistreri’s aesthetic leans more towards the simple modernism of de Chirico, but there is still the post-Cubist fascination with simplification of form and geometric and mechanistic objects driving the work which also propelled Boccioni’s landmark Development of a Bottle in Space of 1913.

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Balistreri’s alignment with Modernism is based on an economy of means, or form, which often centers on three types: the sphere or organic “rock,” the extruded cylinder, and a third more variable rectilinear solid.  Unlike his cherished boilers, Balistreri’s compositions are assembled without the implication of a logical unification of parts or components—there are not machines: A does not connect to B, and neither A nor B feed into C.  Instead Balistreri’s organizing principle is humanist—his massing is obliquely figurative.  In Big Red Pincer (2025), a core column of three rough-hewn “stones” is intersected by two simultaneously sharply angled and sinuous tubes.  This active assemblage is framed by glistening irregular but smooth and clean-cut rectilinear U and L-shaped forms.  We do not feel the steam coursing through Big Red Pincer, but instead intuit the movement of the many arms of Shiva—Balistreri has fashioned a dancing and gyrating being from his parts.  The same sensation emanates from Red Mantis (2024) or Aftermath: The Blizzard of 1982 (2025), which seems to interweave its wrists above its head in a serpentine motion.

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Balistreri works in ceramic, so his ability to manipulate surface can span a wide range of possible textures and colors, from metallic, to lusciously wet and rich in color, to gritty matte masonry.  While the polychrome works mentioned above highlight the energy and gesture in the artist’s compositions, his monochrome pieces zero in on the moments of cohesion between components, providing a series of comparisons of shape to shape, and the emotions evoked by those associations.  Asphalt in January (2024), standing slightly taller than four feet, evokes a being, composed of four spheres, seemingly clutching at various lengths of pipe.  The sculpture is not realistic, but the translation of the association of forms into an emotional subtext, perhaps only in the eye of this beholder, is present and enigmatic. The emergent free forms, like the billowing excess in Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), lend Asphalt in January a level of detail which distinguishes it from simply an experiment in formal arrangement of solids and instead gives the composition a sharp and imperious air.  It is a narrowness of these formal parameters though—with the employment of occasional unexpected detail— and the deft use of surface that makes Balistreri’s sculptures engaging and continually evolving personalities.  Instead of insisting that the viewer remain in a constant state of flux, as in Futurism, they do instead ask that we stop and meditate on the meanings contained in the parts, on the relationships implied in the most fundamental geometries.