Vito Stassi
"A window open to another reality", this is how Vito Stassi defines painting, a refined connoisseur of luministic, timbral and tonal secrets. And looking at his canvases - all small and medium sized, populated by fragments of a veiled, forgotten everyday life - the sensation is that painting is truly a possibility of overcoming, of a slight breakthrough. Nothing that can be attributed to the fantastic, nor properly to the dreamlike or metaphysical. His is a figuration that fades, that disappears, that sometimes ends up imploding in a retinal black streaked with small flashes.
Reality, yes; but just as it gets caught in the eye, when the gaze is detached from the sun or when one is preparing to sleep, in the dark. Reality as optical or mnemonic residue: what we remember, what we save, what remains imprinted, not equal to itself, shaky, evaporating. On the wave of that same melancholy that has to do with death and consumption, with memory and its unstable persistence.
Faces, objects, houses: the variegated catalog of his production is diluted and uniformed in the brief palette, made up of sepia hues, dusty greys, whites and blacks. The series on archaeological finds – capitals, prehistoric statuettes, Greco-Roman heads – once again accentuates the nostalgic note, drawing ghosts from a lost past. And bringing them back to life, with the soft gesture of the brush and the soft skin of an immaterial painting.
