Aldo Balding

Aldo is dedicated to the human form. But he puts his formal virtuosity at the service of human drama. Virtually all of his paintings buzz with narrative possibilities. Who are the three inscrutable men in Conversation III? What are they planning? What have they just done? What are they going to do? And what about the couple in The Early Hours? Are they lovers? If so, is their affair bursting into life or fracturing?

Aldo is proud to admit he's in the storytelling business, even if he lets us fill in the gaps. "I always try to put an element of mystery in my work," he says. "You can suggest so much in a gesture, in the way someone stands. I like narrative in painting, because it casts the viewer into a voyeuristic role."

The pull of suggested narrative explains why so many of the figures in Aldo's work have their backs to us. "When a person is face-on, it's a portrait, and the mystique is gone," explains Aldo. Many of these backs belong, of course, to the be-suited men who appear throughout the artist's work. The prevalence of so many jackets and ties has led some to describe Aldo's work as nostalgic — something he's keen to move away from. "I prefer to think of the scenes I depict as timeless. They are little dramas that could be from any era."

But the suits will remain. Simply, Aldo loves the formal challenge posed by all those silken creases. Indeed, he's recently applied himself to improving the way he renders the kind of sharp and soft edges we see in a painting such as the aforementioned Odyssey VI. It might sound highly pedantic to the rest of us — edges? — but this dedication to detail is what makes Aldo such a terrific craftsman. And this collection of formally superb and profoundly mysterious paintings proves it yet again.

Magazine Articles

Artist International (Issue 22) — Front Cover
Artist International (Issue 27) — 5-page feature
Artists and Illustrators
Artist and Illustrator Magazine

Commissions and Major Collections

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
Lady Laura Paul
The Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden, Germany, purchased two works for their collection