Bio & Artist Statement - Assunta Cassa

In Assunta Cassa's oil paintings, space and time become living chromatic fragments, which recompose themselves into narratives of freedom and representations of deep emotions.

Bio

The artist lives and works in her studio in San Benedetto del Tronto, in the centre of Italy. Growing up in Manfredonia, she developed a great passion for drawing, which she continued to cultivate during her university years in Pescara.

After meeting a group of artists in San Benedetto del Tronto in 2008, she decided to give space to her love for art and attended training courses and art workshops, exploring both figurative and abstract art and experimenting with different techniques and media. Since 2012 she has dedicated herself solely to his artistic career.

Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, including the International Biennial of Bari and Metropolitan Area in 2018, for three years at the AR[t]CEVIA International Art Festival and the Cimitile Prize. There have been several exhibitions abroad: Paris, Tokyo, Bratislava. Among the many solo shows, she was present in Foggia with the exhibition “Oltre l’Orizzonte” in 2017.

She also designed the cover of the album “Metaphors” by the well-known American bassist Alphonso Johnson. Since May 2022 the image of her work “Malala. Stronger than fear” has been part of the permanent installation “Arte del Dialogo–Agorà” in Pieve di Cadore.

Statement

Assunta Cassa has created her own original figurative language through the division of the visual space that originates from the fragmentation into pixels of digital images.

In particular, she takes her cue from the “dimension” that we unconsciously live in our smartphones, computers, tablets: the tiny, infinitesimal pixels’ dimensions, which, incredibly fast in their overlapping, animate the images and give life to our screens.

Assunta-Cassa---Dancity---Olio-su-tela---70x160

Assunta Cassa, Dancity, 60×170, 2020

Assunta’s idea is to crystallize, isolate, manipulate, mix, and materialize them on her canvases, with a quantum effect. With her work she wants to show us the current reality as a fragmented pixels with intense colors that intertwine and condense into a single image, filtered by her sensitivity, her thoughts and her experiences. Assunta Cassa created her first series of works from 2012 to 2017, and she dedicated them to tango as a metaphor for life, a way to bring bodies and souls together in harmony.

The artist then opens her research to glimpses of landscapes and cities that acquire a new meaning, symbolizing life and costnat change in both nature and man.

This is how the visions of metropolitan cities were conceived, where the gray urban horizons acquire the strength of colors through the narration of characters who, while in solitude, reflect the pulse of life and are caught in the details we usually overlock. It is a snapshot of what happens, which is gone a moment later, but for this reason, it is precious, since it tells the “vibrating of the soul’s strings”.

Assunta Cassa, Dreamcity, 60×80, 2019

She also paints portraits, in which pixels of bright and material colors express the many facets of the interiority and complexity of the people depicted.

Female images dominate, often beeing captured behind to observe the sky and sea merging in the horizon, a reflection of the quest for self-awareness and value and to conquer the freedom to follow one’s own path.

These are depictions of a timeless dimension, where city and nature interpenetrate with the image of the protagonists, the fragmented colors intertwine and merge; the result is a powerful representation of moods and a feeling of mental and physical energy, that is projected towards the viewer.

Assunta Cassa, Monica Vitti, 40×40, 2022

Assunta Cassa, Malala: stronger than fear, 100×100, 2020

Assunta dedicates also a series of works to the theme of freedom. Such as the Malala’s portrait, the younger Nobel Peace Prize, symbolically portrayed between the bars of a prison that break, thanks to her fortitude.

Between 2011 and 2015, she also painted abstract works, in which she expressed her most intimate emotions and the sounds of her own soul with fast and instinctual spatulas. The whirlwind of emotions permeates her paintings, a dialogue between color and unconscious that allows her to express the deepest experiences, from pain to joy and freedom.

Assunta Cassa’s abstracts communicate with us through color, free from compositional graphic constructions, the soul of Assunta, proud, solemn, passionate, joyous, crazy, nostalgic, with the same musical and chromatic rhythm also present in her figurative paintings.

In all her artworks, the artist conveys the energy of life, the ability of man to overcome the darkness and turn on the lights of his street, to color anonymous cities, to escape the loneliness and superficiality of them, to stop in the silence of a landscape to seek his own awareness able to stop in the silence of a landscape to seek his own awareness.