Ivana Belloni's work is firmly placed in a tendency called "the last naturalism": a genre which has sprung up out of the fusion between the intense and sensual love of painting and an equally intense love of nature.
Her work has a particular affinity with that of Piero Giunni, who portrays nature using thick almost chalky materials and refined, magical colours.
Belloni uses traditional oil paints and more impoverished materials such as sand, and old-fashioned materials like the pure pigments used in frescoes. This combination of the rough and the smooth, the shiny and the opaque, gives her land-scapes a sense of vibrancy and life, weaving a story out of air and light.
The rhythm of the brushstrokes reflects the inner strength of a vegetation which is in constant transformation, forever "becoming"; you can feel the air moving through the plants and the perfume, sensations and memories which are carried in the air. Vegetation is depicted in all its exuberance, at the beight of summer and in all its festive glory, however nature is not all grace and beauty, it also has a more strident, rough side.
The paintings sometimes have two areas of vision, a backgroung which evokes a dreamlike, visceral nature and a foreground which evokes the hard external world, the concrete. Nature is not idyllic, its vitality is both rough and dissonant and at times aggressive but even when the dramatic tones of dusk show a storm brewing on the horizon, always positive. The artist portrays a romantic, overwhelming landscape deriving its emotion and enthusiasm from the encounter with vegetation and colour, the pink of a bunch of flowers or the yellow gold of broom. The roughness of nature is juxtaposed with the joy of colour, she plays with difficult colours: a harmony of yellow and green with specks of pulsing brick red. The use of pure colours gives a sense of freshness and completeness, the artist illuminates a subject which in itself would be opaque and granular, her work reflects nature in all its radiance.