Biography

Arturo Livio Baldo was born in Rovereto in the province of Trent on the 18^th of May 1927 and passed away in Padua on the 16^th of April 2004.

In 1962 he started painting oil on canvass dabbling with August Renoir’s “The vase of roses”.

In that year he got married with Amelia Salmaso who met during his several visits in Padua, also known as the city of St. Anthony.

His art intertwined with life, body and almost with the flesh of that artist commonly described as naïf but typified by a primitive ingenuity that evokes Eden, lost with the original sin.

During his youth and his very last years, he was much involved with social activities that he considered as the highest sum of human empathy, a sort of cum-patior that makes mankind the universal being par excellence. He dedicated himself to the theater, he was member of his native town’s filodrammatica and he acted in many comedies written by his fellow countryman Guido Chiesa and represented in the local theater.

In spite of his fame, Arturo Livio Baldo behaved as an amateur living life with the sensibility of those who graft in it and live it deeply but also with that shyness that pushed him to collect himself among the intimacy of his mountain landscapes – his birthplaces – to regain the emotions and feelings of his childhood and youth.

Painting was not just the unique interest of Arturo Livio who loved to work with the  matter as well. All his works  are constituted by experimentations in which  he modeled the original material – marble, iron, wood – to pull out something really close to a work feasible just  through the five senses but at the same time it turned into “something  other” related to the thought, the gaze and the hand that worked on it.

Landscapes, venetian lanes, glimpses of visited and beloved cities, the travels in youth, the travels in adulthood: all the visual and emotional experiences regain colour and soul on the toile extent that Arturo Livio first tamed with much respect – tinges, strokes,  uncertain lines that suggest and not yet define a sketch of a retrieved world that seeks an ultimate placement –  and then  turned into an experienced and nearly settled  place;  an expressive mean of an order that gets the better  through human and professional experiences.

The intimacy, the recovery into space and nature, the breathe of his own mountains and the shaded lines of urban glimpses alternate with social issues, the history of popes and portraits of illustrious men almost to declare deep roots that widen through social environment and the narration of modern and contemporary reality and the values that characterizes it.

Every work takes shape more clearly step by step: the attention to details turns almost into obsession, the representation turns into expression of reality in which intertwine the reconstruction  and the process of emotional understanding. At least the reality that is represented, even if rich in elements pictured in detail, is enshrouded in a light that enhance and inform about the life of the artist that was typified by a strict faith, social activities and the adherence to definitive values.

Commitment, art, action for youth and for the weak dominated his life: from his teaching in high school to his humble service in daily mass and to the presidency of voluntary organizations.

The death of his wife, suddenly occurred in 1999, blocked his hand.

The car accident happened in 2000 changed him. After three years and half of pain he passed away at the age of 77.