Commentary
Marco Sassone’s expressionist talents, developed over a lifetime of focused work, beautifully express themselves in his gesture-driven studies of cities such as Venice and San Francisco, his affecting but never sentimentalized portraits of the homeless, or his views of the exteriors and interiors of churches. Sassone, the student of Florentine painter Silvio Loffredo, himself the student of the great Austrian portraitist Oscar Kokoschka, uses vivid brushmarks to build up views of people, cities, and landscapes; he is not afraid to face some of life’s most tragic aspects, for example, in his riveting portraits of San Francisco’s homeless. At the same time, he is effective because of his technical skills as a painter; his impastoed canvases, heavy with paint, nonetheless give the appearance of light on water, as with the Venice works, or interior light, as happens with studies of the insides of churches or other buildings.
Attention should be paid to the brushstrokes themselves, which build upon each other and achieve an anxious, quivering energy. This style is particularly strong in Sassone’s paintings of the homeless, who provoke and nearly overwhelm the viewer with the intensity of their unrelieved suffering. At the same time, we can see, in the beautiful views of Venice or the California coast, an artist intent on a presentation of architecture or nature that also communicates a raw passion for form. Sassone’s strength lies in his ability to convey the atmosphere surrounding a view. His feeling for the spiritual in art is equalled by his virtuosic ability and his genuine concern for the dispossessed, those people we are too often afraid to make contact with. One senses that Sassone is as committed to humanity as he is to painting, remembering that, as a young child, he brought a beggar home out of sympathy for his circumstances. His integrity as a man is made stronger by his commitment as an artist, enabling him to report on the fate of the living and the ethereal, but passionate, beauty of light in various conditions, indoors or outside.
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