Marco Cassarà (Born in Palermo, IT 1984)

Abstraction is at the center of his research, the investigation of color, stroke, and form, often explored through extra-pictorial materials, including metal in his more recent works.

His chromatic conception is reminiscent of Italian Tonalism, achieving peaks of luminosity through layers of glazing, by an interplay of adding and subtracting color, strong chromatic contrasts emerge, concentrated on configurations of signs. The stroke is characterized by processes of abrasion, lively by an instinctive and automatic gestuality, it’s conveyed and engraved with electric grinders, amplifying its effect, creating a drawing so refined or blurred that it appears virtual. The form tends to have a centrality, often emphasized by an extremization of the support.

Finally the conceptual use of the “word”, intermittent among his works, is emphasized and veiled as a secret, with the Braille alphabet. Employed as a metaphor for a deeper mode of perception, and most as means of creating an inclusive and poetic dialogue with a visually impaired audience.

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.  In which linguistic processes and inner processes converge into a single visual code. Exuding a perceptible “resonance” of the performative action of the engraving with electric grinders. 

After collaborating with the Venetian collective Fondazione Malutta, with which he participated in various exhibitions in galleries and institutional spaces such as Monitor Gallery and Museum Santa Maria della Scala. In 2020 he conceived and directed Studio Luminescent, a digital pop-up project that involved international artists in the multimedia work Leviathan-19, the winner of the Pandemos public call by Fondazione Studio Rizoma. 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. In 2024 he took part to the exhibition Animae, a project by the Fondazione Sicilia, first of a series of exhibitions dedicated to the most representative artists of the territory; recently the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo acquired one of his artist’s books for its permanent collection.