Soul mirrors - Assunta Cassa

A face doesn’t need to be whole to tell everything.

In this series I explore details — eyes, noses, ears, mouths. Each anatomical fragment is already a portrait: it carries the facets of an identity in motion, open, never final. Like the painterly pixels that build it, the figure reveals itself without fixing itself.

Soul Mirrors explores that thin threshold between the self and the other. A presence enters, seeps in, something transforms. As in quantum physics, the observer is never neutral — in the very act of looking, something changes. In both. And this begins already in the act of painting.

The fragment of the face and the pictorial fragment are the same thing: like shards of a mirror, each detail repeats itself under a different light and reveals a new whole. Identity opens, blends, continues to become.

It all began with eyes. I See You — like the greeting of the Na’vi people — a sequence of gazes in which looking means recognizing. Not just seeing the other, but welcoming them in their difference. An encounter that transforms both who looks and who is looked at, reciprocally. From there the research expanded: noses, ears, mouths. Each detail of the face as a threshold, as a place where identity meets what it is not.