Marco Sassone - Reviews

Reviews

Excerpts from selected reviews and catalog essays

“. . .Evolving a vision and style of painting distinctly his own. . .” - FRIDOLF JOHNSON, American Artist, New York (July 1980)

“One of the foremost colorists working in America today, Sassone is a gestural painter, an artist who becomes totally absorbed in the act of painting. The result is work powerfully expressive, evocative, and sometimes haunting in its beauty.” - JANET DOMINIK, Sassone, Bernheim-Jeune, exhibition catalog, Paris, France (April 13 - May 4, 1988)

“The persistent theme does not carry a denunciation of a social problem, but it is rather the pretext to pour forth onto canvas the urgency of the brush strokes…Here it is the water that becomes the turbulent element, troubled by vestiges and shadows resulting from distant echoes of Sassone’s teacher, Silvio Loffredo, who paints with similar, quick brush strokes, trailing onto the canvas a wake of vibrant color.” - PAOLA BORTOLOTTI, La Nazione, Florence, Italy (May 16, 1997)

“These places are seen from the distance of affection mixed with longing, of memory mixed with the immediacy of everyday experience. Through Sassone’s vision of the two worlds in which he will always live, we can experience what it is like to find ourselves far from where we started, yet be at home wherever we are.” - MARIA PORGES, MB Modern, Marco Sassone exhibition catalog, New York (December 7 – 22, 2000)

“Sassone’s paintings explode with color and light. His passion for architecture and water is obvious. From his scenes of Venice canals to the streets of San Francisco, Sassone uses his cities not as a subject but rather as the canvas. He paints over the city with his interpretation of the pace and mood he sees.” - FRANCIS MILL, NY Arts, New York, (May 2001)

“A canvas like Chinese Reds (1990) in its scarlet color relates to the chromatic scheme of his teacher’s Angel of Death (1998), while alarming paintings like Marlboro Country (1990) with its human skulls spread in the foreground, or Coit Tower Night (1988) – a painting of deep blue water, a brown hill and a violent purple sky – all done with an agitated brush, elicit a fervent emotion, comparable to the sensations evoked by the canvases of Kokoschka himself.” - PETER SELZ, Museo ItaloAmericano, Master and Pupil exhibition catalog, San Francisco (May 10 – July 8, 2001)

“In these persuasively lonely and poignant paintings, the grey-blue tracks, which invariably look like tracks that have borne no trains for decades, begin in the foreground and wander off into the distance. They thread this way and that through foggy grey middle grounds and out into oblivion, the flecking and dabbing of Sassone’s brush reading now as the rusting, flaking and slow ruin that comes with abandonment.” - GARY MICHAEL DAULT, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada (April 12, 2008)

“As products of Sassone’s hand, even such unsightly things as expressways and parking lots become magical, not only because they are cast in an ethereal, post-impressionistic glow, but also because the artist sees them as dynamic, muscular roots into the heart of a vibrant city.” - DAVID BALZER, Toronto Life, Toronto, Canada (April 2008)

"These dark paintings are, after all, not primarily about the darkness that pervades them, but about the light that manages to shine through." - PETER CLOTHIER, The Huffington Post, Canada (March 2012)