19.20 Painting

Elio Cassarà was born in Mazara del Vallo in 1974. The artist’s painting tends to abstract art, attributable to the intense effects of lights and the expressiveness of color in his narration of landscapes. In his paintings we can see the evolutionary nature of painting, based on the careful observation of the environment which dissolves into a fantastic vision, full of suggestions and imaginative power. After training with some local artists, in 1997 Cassarà lived in Venice where he studied the masters of the twentieth century in greater depth and in particular his attention was captured by Giorgio Morandi’s still-life. These were the years in which he devoted himself intensely to the study of painting; he was strongly influenced by the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, the symbolism of Marx Klinger and Arnold Böcklin and the ideas of the radical Pre-Raphaelites. In 2001 he moved to Berlin where he lived for many years and hosted several personal exhibitions. The period spent in Germany and his admiration for Gerhard Richter influenced Cassarà’s work which became more abstract and expressive and it was at this stage that the landscape became the main subject of the artist’s work. In his paintings, he depicts vitality and relationship with nature using vibrant colors that energizes the entire surface of the canvas. In 2007, he had a one-man show at Narodni Muzej Zajecar (Serbia) curated by Bora Dimitrjevic and Nina Pogarcic. On his return to Venice in 2014, Cassarà completed his series of paintings inspired by his long stay in Germany, which were exhibited the following years. He often visited Sicily to absorb the light and the colors to elaborate them in paintings later. By the end of 2020, he moved to Moscow to study the Russian medieval art and to hold some important art exhibitions. Starting from 2016, Elio Cassarà is present at the permanent collection of MUSEUM – Osservatorio dell’arte in Sicily, under the founding director Ezio Pagano. In 2022 the Moscow Museum of Modern Art chose one of the paintings for its permanent collection following a one-man show “Il Colore Del Vento” at the Pushkin Public Library in Moscow. In 2023, the Foundation Orestiadi - Museo delle Trame Mediterranee in Gibellina included two artworks in its permanent collection. Always in 2023, the Diaghilev Museum of Modern Art in St. Petersburg inserted one of the artworks showed at a one-man show “Levkas” to the collection of the Museum.