Marco Sassone

Excerpts from selected reviews and catalogue essays

"Sassone's realistic expressionist paintings are born of a caring heart wounded by personal displacement and brushes with homelessness, but in his paintings one also finds sanctuary, solace, and deliverance."
- KÓAN JEFF BAYSA, "Marco Sassone – Santuario" Catalogue, Rome
(October 2010)

"The painter remains a visionary, describing tall buildings and merging highways as he forges a rapport with Toronto. Sassone is profoundly interested in rendering a nearly mythic ambience, whose experience borders on the sublime."
- JONATHAN GOODMAN, Marco Sassone: Toronto, Odon Wagner Contemporary Exhibition Catalogue, Toronto, Canada
(April 3 – 26, 2008)

"You'll find yourself wading about in miasmas of pigment applied with such painterly verve and chromatic generosity you catch yourself wanting to eat the stuff with a spoon."
- GARY MICHAEL DAULT, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada
(December 4, 2004)

"The man with blue eyes stares out at you…His pupils gape at an interior world which he invites you to enter, without knocking. The brush strokes are merciless. As a man and as a painter, Marco Sassone, was sucked up into the world of the homeless from the time he was a child, at Campi Bisenzio."
- ILARIA BONUCCELLI, La Republica, Rome, Italy
(April 4 2002)

"All of this goes into the throbbing realism of Marco Sassone, even when he decides to do without color and rely on the simple line of drawing...The marks that graze the paper are therefore searching to uncover the true essence of things; from this stems a clear awareness, on the part of those who view them, that the truth, like a curious fly, has remained entangled in their gossamer web."
- MASSIMO BERTOZZI, Palazzo Ducale Museum, "With Heart and Mind - Reality and Fantasy in Marco Sassone's Painting" exhibition catalogue, Massa, Italy
(March 23 - April 28, 2002)

"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 catalogue, San Francisco
(May 10 - July 8, 2001)

"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)

"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 catalogue, New York
(December 7 - 22, 2000)

"The process of increasingly mature investigation into the never satisfied quest for an aesthetic point of view contributed to awaken in Sassone the memory of his Florentine encounters and of the new approaches he learned in the mediated teaching of Kokoschka...The anger has subsided, the composition once again starts to delineate its essential linguistic character."
- TOMMASO PALOSCIA, Galleria D'Arte Mentana, "The roots of Marco Sassone" exhibition catalogue, Florence, Italy
(April 26 - May 16, 1997)

"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)

"There is true technical brilliance here... In the drawings, his technique seems to discover fresh descriptive possibilities each time out."
- KENNETH BAKER, San Francisco Chronicle
(April 17, 1994)

"What the artist shows us in drawings of the early 1990's... is not merely the face of a homeless man but the story of the human misery written there... In his desolate landscapes... man is most frequently seen alone, reduced to the struggle for survival in a universe that seems at once to swallow and reject him..."
- PETER CLOTHIER, Museo ItaloAmericano, "Home on the Streets" exhibition catalogue, San Francisco
(March 30 - May 29, 1994)

"Sassone uses watercolor in much the same way he uses oil... The instinct for knowing when to stop allows him to build his surfaces in a painterly way, without overworking them, and we are rewarded by a richness and resonant color not often found in this medium."
- MARIAH MARVIN, Pasquale Iannetti Art Gallery, "Body of Water" exhibition catalogue, San Francisco
(March 12 - April 10, 1993)

"This is powerful and difficult stuff. Yet there's cause for celebration here, both for the artist and for those who care about his work. The real excitement is in watching this extraordinarily gifted painter come to new terms with his medium, freeing hand and mind to explore its possibilities in ways more adventurous and challenging than he has ever tried before."
- PETER CLOTHIER, Italian Cultural Institute, exhibition catalogue, San Francisco
(March 1991)

"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, Bernheim-Jeune, exhibition catalogue, Paris, France
(April 13 - May 4, 1988)

"The artist directs his talents and his marvelous craftsmanship to one end: the rendering of the sensuous aspects of the physical world. He depends on the flow of natural light and manipulates color into complex and beautiful harmonies."
- ANN SEYMOUR, Nob Hill Gazette, San Francisco
(September, 1986)

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

"At times his work reflects the influence of the French Pointillists, Seurat and Signac; but Sassone has fashioned his own style and it is not imitative."
- LARRY RUMLEY, The Seattle Times
(March 9, 1980)

"His work possesses a consistency and a rationale that speak of his having achieved a harmony between the experiences of life and the dictates of art. The result has been a highly personal kind of painting that owes no allegiance to any momentary vogue."
- DONELSON F. HOOPES, "Sassone" monograph
(1979)

"What strikes the eye at first in Sassone's art is his sensuous presentation. His works are pervaded by the joy of painting what truly pleases and fascinates him. This elegant idiosyncrasy is expressed in full light, fragrant with tonal harmony and luxurious from the sweep of his thick brushwork."
- PHYLLIS BARTON, Southwest Art, Houston, Texas
(November, 1975)

"Sassone is impressively gifted as a colorist and skilled in rendering reflections and color in light."
- WILLIAM WILSON, Los Angeles Times
(November 14, 1975)

"A rare power of construction. . .a terse color. . .In these paintings, there is the overall enchantment of a light that vibrates everywhere - stretches, flows, even falls as if suddenly combining with the air in an explosive mixture of marines, mountains and trees. Often, a melting beauty of past memories."
- AURELIO RAGIONIERI, La Nazione, Florence, Italy
(November 12, 1973)