Artist Statement
Marco Sassone is an artist who has focused on exploring the act of painting, its innate expressiveness. By emphasizing the gesture, he points not only to his training with Silvio Loffredo, a painter in Florence who studied with Kokoschka, he also gives the nod to his long stay in America, a period which lasted nearly forty years. His penchant for encapsulating the feeling of a place or person with shaggy, energetic mark-making allows him to portray not only the form but also the essence of his subject matter, which consists of portraits of the homeless, studies of Venice or the California coast, inside and outside views of churches.
It is important to remember that the artist’s social integrity is a major part of his art: his paintings of the homeless give this marginal group dignity even as he reports on their suffering. It is a way of maintaining honesty; he writes in a letter, “I am still negotiating my existence, and I never lied or tried to save myself by choosing the easier path.” As a painter, Sassone’s empathy is palpable, creating an atmosphere in which there is no distance between the theme and its viewers. Such a combination of imaginative involvement and expressive skill makes the artist someone to see—and to remember. |
