In an essay on the Lithuanian painter and musician Mikalojus Kostantinas Čiurlionis, the critic Vjačeslàv Ivanov wrote the following: The centrifugal inclinations of solitary artists do not lead them involuntarily into a vacuum, where new worlds of forms could be formed, but into vague solar systems, into the territories of the muses, and invoke ambiguous hybrid forms of creation, which result not in artibus, but inter Artes.1 Marco Cassarà’s pictorial research implicitly feeds on the same suggestions, and in fact moves in the sphere of symbolic abstraction. […]
1 Vjačeslàv Ivànov, “Čiurlionis and the Problem of the Synthesis of the Arts”, on Luca Quattrocchi M.K. Čiurlionis: preludio all’astrattismo, Pendragon Edition, Bologna, 2000.
excerpt from:
Marco Cassarà | I Libri della Trasmigrazione (The Books of Transmigration)
by Giusi Diana
Text for the catalog of the exhibition “Time: Mask and Unmask”, curated by Viviana Vannucci and Moinuddin Khaled, Palazzo Pisani-Revedin, National Pavilion of Bangladesh, 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.
Marco Cassarà – Vagus Nerve (details), 2024, abrasions and oil on galvanized sheets metal, cm 180 X 180. video Fausto Brigantino
Marco Cassarà – Vagus Nerve (details), 2024
The Bones of Light series takes its name from the homonymous artist’s installation, exhibited in the spaces of L’Ascensore in Palermo. The works develop around the stroke, amplified by refracting light in the abrasions and grooves engraved with electric grinders on metal surfaces.
Metal, with its natural quality of reflecting and refracting light, becomes a living medium, emphasized by the thin glazings of oil paint. Along with the stroke, the color is as if discovered: both emerge, revealing themselves during the creative process.
Each engraving is the result of an instinctive gesture, at times ritualistic, brings the creative act closer to a zen meditative state, defined as Mushin (absence of mind). In this state, the artist works with such automatic transport that he often engraves with his eyes closed, letting the work emerge spontaneously.
A distinctive feature of the series is its kinetic effect: the engraved strokes, interacting with light and the viewer’s movement, generate a dynamic and immersive experience and an iridescent abstraction characterized by the light conditions. The effect is like an electronic display, but with a strangely archaic aura. The engravings, extended over the entire surface of the works, appear like holograms, evoking energy flows or ancient primitive signs, almost suggesting something of original, a primordial visual language, somehow in connection with quantum mechanics.
“I like to think light is intrinsic to the material of the work, and emerges to the surface through the strokes I carve, like the whiteness of bones emerges from a wound. Bones support us, we feel their shape, they are sculptural lines within us. We identify with them. I imagine how a primitive man experienced the proprioceptive sensation of his skeleton. The association with pain when a bone is uncovered by a deep wound, what might have evoked in him seeing the bones of an animal, or the skeleton of a human being. The association of the pain with death. Projecting all of this on a conceptual level, in that hypothetical wound I imagine a point of conjunction, a breach between the universe and the microcosm of a person. In that spot I like to place the works of Bones of Light.”
PALEOSONIC
2024
abrasions and oil
on galvanized sheets metal
cm 165 x 200
Marco Cassarà – Bones of Light, curated by Giusi Diana
05 april – 01 june 2024
L’Ascensore, Palermo, IT
artistic direction Genuardi Ruta
technical assistans Michele Zingales, Antonio Vassallo, Salvo Ficano
photo Fausto Brigantino graphic C4dmio
BONES OF LIGHT
2024
abrasions and oil
on galvanized sheets metal
installation view
BONES OF LIGHT
2024
limited edition
debossed braille
heavy weight
paper sheets,
print on portfolio paper
Marco Cassarà – I Libri della Trasmigrazione, 2017-2022, installation view. photo C4dmio
Marco Cassarà – I Libri della Trasmigrazione
I LIBRI DELLA TRASMIGRAZIONE
(THE BOOKS OF TRANSMIGRATION)
“I Libri della Trasmigrazione” is a series of artist’s books begun in 2017, representing not only one of the artist’s most representative works, but also the main space in which his pictorial language has been developed in the latest years.
The series draws inspiration from the Pythagorean concept of metempsychosis (from the Greek μετεμψύχωσις), and aims to create an imaginative narration, evoking the abstraction of the soul’s passage from one body to another, between lives and states of existence. The spiritual and conceptual dimension of transmigration can be perceived from the titles of the works in this series, including the diptych “Il Libro della Madre” (The Book of the Mother) and ” Il Libro della Padre” (The Book of the Father), which has already been exhibited in the Bangladesh National Pavilion’s for the exhibition “Time: Mask and Unmask” at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.
The works of this series are primarily painterly; bright tones, dense with contrasts and depth, create a visual and immersive experience, punctuated by changes of atmosphere between pages, in which color and stroke, play a symbolic role, intermittent to the use of the “word,” that is emphasized and veiled in all works with the Braille alphabet. The poetic use of the Braille alphabet is a distinctive feature of the series, employed not only as a means of creating an inclusive dialogue with a visually impaired audience, but also as a metaphor for another, deeper mode of perception.
In addition to Il Libro della Madre and Il Libro del Padre, to date, the series includes hundreds of studies between oils on canvas or metal, a collection of engravings on PVC, already acquired in the collection of artist’s books of the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, and finally two artist’s books in progress, “Il Libro dei Nomi” (The Book of the Names) and “Il Libro del Cielo” (The Book of the Sky), in which the pictorial language is enriched by the peculiarity of the chosen materials (metal sheets and gelatine sheets), which characterize a special optical illusion of light projections. In those works, the lyricism of braille is more emphasized, and determines its symbolic value.
Nirvana, 2023
NIRVANA, 2023
NIRVANA
(series)
“Nirvana means freedom from pain,
suffering and the external world,
and that’s pretty close to
my definition of Punk”
Kurt Cobain
In Buddhism Nirvana is the ultimate goal of life, beyond rational thought and language, a state of transcendence. If this, in any way, can come close to the concept of Punk, Kurt Cobain’s interpretation could arouse aesthetic suggestions of contemporary spirituality.
While seekers of the truth strive for the absolute through discipline, long contemplative meditations, and reciting mantras; on the other, extremely sensitive rockstars tend it with dissoluteness, evoke it with dramatic force and with bold sense of poetry. Sound patterns, electric guitar riffs, existential verses, obsessive chorus, finally reach millions of people, becoming interpreters of a collective state of mind. Becoming a religion.
“Nirvana is therefore a spiritual concept that sounds kind of Grunge. I’ve been working on the paintings of this sequence with the same iridescent spirit; with a pictorial approach somewhat punk, instinctive and immediate, but at the same time contemplative. I conceived it as a single work. Imagining the sound, its shape, its tension, its colour; sometimes quiescent, sometimes rhythmic, as within a mystical composition, or an electric guitar solo”.
NIRVANA
series
2023
oil on canvas
cm 21 x 29,7
each
Animae, 2024, installation view, Villa Zito, Fondazione Sicilia. photo Antonio Vassallo
Animae, Installation view, Fondazione Sicilia
THE RISING
(series)
[…] My graphic language is characterized by the use of electric grinders. I would say, my stroke is amplified by the electricity channeled into my wrist. The sign therefore, occurs by subtraction of matter by means of mechanical abrasions, a “dematerialization” in the surface, in which “events” happen and are defined.
The first time I etched an “electric sign” on a surface was accidental, on a calfskin that had been hanging in the studio for months. I really didn’t know what to do with it, and I felt a great sense of responsibility; it was the leather of a skinned body, hanging in the wall, intense with drama and tension.
So, caught up in a sudden rage, my eyes fell on a grinder, and as if in an inspired flow, the shot went off: a mark that had the force of a symbol – so refined and blurry at the same time – that it looked like a hologram in and out of the surface of that skin, a revelation. A liberating expression that I felt cathartic both for me and for the memory about the animal.
So I began the series The Rising, a long cycle of works on leather, of which the creative processes, were catalysts for a personal growth experience (in which I also stopped eating meat). […]
“In the works of The Rising, the evocative power of animal skin brings the engraving by means of grinders to a performative level, establishing a tension that results in a transfert between two bodies, or forms, that of the animal and mine “
PSYCHE (ψυχή)
2019
abrasions and pigments
on tanned leather
cm 120 x 100
Solar Plexus, exhibition view. Courtesy N38E13.
english version follows
Sono l’ologramma nella mia carne,
assieme alla terra
e agli altri pianeti
giro attorno al sole,
col sole e altre stelle
attorno a un buco nero.
Ogni istante,
nell’universo
attraverso vastità
incommensurabili,
eppure, da sempre
sento di essere qua.
I am the hologram in my flesh,
along with the earth
and the other planets
I revolve around the sun,
ALONG with the sun and other stars
around a black hole.
Every moment
in the universe
i traverse immense vastness,
yet, I always
feel I am here