Marco Cassarà (Born in Palermo, IT 1984)

At the center of his research is abstraction, the investigation of color, sign, and form, often explored through extra-pictorial materials, including metal in his recent works.

His chromatic conception is that of tonal painting, achieving peaks of luminosity through layers of glazes, where, from an interplay of adding and subtracting color, strong chromatic contrasts emerge, concentrating configurations of signs. The sign is characterized by processes of abrasion, lively with an instinctive and automatic gestuality, and is conveyed and engraved with electric grinders, amplifying its stroke and effect, creating a drawing so refined or blurred that it appears like virtual. The form tends to have a centrality, often emphasized by an extremization of the support.

Environmental-scale installations, halfway between painting and sculpture, artist’s books composed of bound canvases, tanned leathers tattooed with pure pigments, give life to abstract works with a digital yet archaic aura, where linguistic processes and inner processes converge into a single visual code, where is perceptible the “resonance” of the performative action of engraving with electric grinders.

After collaborating with the Venetian collective Fondazione Malutta, with which he participated in various exhibitions in galleries and institutional spaces, in 2019, he conceived and directed Studio Luminescent, a digital pop-up project that involved international artists in the multimedia work Leviathan-19, winner of the Pandemos public call by Fondazione Studio Rizoma of Palermo. In 2022, he exhibited his work, by invitation, in the National Pavilion of Bangladesh at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, in the exhibition “Time: Mask and Unmask,” curated by Viviana Vannucci and Moinuddin Khaled at Palazzo Pisani-Revedin.