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D A V ID
was still in the beginning of his artistic formation and had an indecisive style— still unsure and undetermined. The style he adopted in his youth was somewhat classical-integral; his carefully executed paintings demonstrate it, in fact, he began painting in a classical trend somewhat realistic somewhat precise, but this did not satisfy his soul. He wanted to seriously break away from the plastic ties and from the classical images of the old school. These tied him down not allowing him to grow. He would have called that classical period of his painting “Period of Bardone� during which time he was greatly influenced by the great teacher. However, that was still a formative period of his growth. The works of that period, a classical and realistic style, were correct and precise in their technical structure. They were executed within the strictest academic rules of the great masters of the past. All those paintings and drawings were the result of all that he had learned and assimilated. They were not sincere nor did they have feelings, they were rather mechanical, artificial, and automatic. This integral-classical style was brought about through the analytical study of many works of art that had been produced from the very beginning of the prehistoric times, from Fidia to Michelangelo, from Leonardo to Tiziano, from El Greco to Velazquez. His return to Paris together with Renato Bardone, his associate in art, opened his eyes to the beauty and originality of modern art; Courbet, Millet, Corot and especially the impressionists and post-impressionists: Monet, Renoir, Manet, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Rouault, Gauguin and Van Gogh (only to name a few). The visits to the Paris museums
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and to other European art galleries had been the best and most enlightening modern painting lessons learned and experienced in person. It was only then that he, studying directly the works of modern painters, realized that he was approaching his own true spiritual research, and the visions he had always dreamed of. In fact, the study of modern art began to create true impressions in him, even though in the beginning it was quite difficult for him to be able to express himself in the language of modern technique. The art of Ivo David has never been an occasional painting or a celebration of an annual or historical recurrence; even though he looked upon the contemporary reality, his inspiration stemmed from history, the Bible, geography, landscape and humanity turning on his search of freedom. From these experiences and from others acquired during his study of the modern artists (and living amongst the modern painters), it then became not so difficult for him to formulate within this medium an artistic culture and create his own style. TOWARD NEW ARTISTIC HORIZONS Thus Ivo David acquired a new sense of freedom from the classicists and from pictorial traditionalism not so much with the study of the impressionists, dadaists, cubists, futurists, fauvists and others, but especially through the probing of the expressionists (Italians, French and Germans). In particular, the abstract French expressionists left a deep imprint on his sensitive mind. Surrealism also generated in him irreversible, deep and unexpected impressions. This poetic-pictorialphilosophic trend was much more
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