Alessandro Casetti: the Soul of the World between Micro and Macrocosm

Alessandro Casetti's artistic production is a fascinating journey whose fundamental notes are emotions, dreams, hopes. We interviewed the artist who - through cracks and fields of colour - describes the Soul of the World in dialogue between microcosm and macrocosm.

Your art is a condensation of iridescent textures and pure chromatic power, sublimated by an extremely sophisticated painting technique. Your works stand in an unexplored realm somewhere between action painting and the finest figurative art. How did you arrive at this synthesis?

I arrived at this synthesis after years of experimentation during which I used various types of colours and materials. Then by mistake I mixed together some paints that generated this unexpected materic effect. It was a time when I was unable to find my artistic direction, and the constant no's I was receiving from insiders, instead of making me give up, spurred me to dare and explore new ways of making art that led me to discover this painting technique. 

To create my works, I use industrial paints, mainly water-based enamels that I apply by gravity on canvas. As they dry on the support, the colours take on different shapes and consistencies, thickening and cracking, creating the effect of crakle (or craquelé). The work therefore becomes material, alive. And the sensation is that of having before one's eyes something infinitely large or infinitely small: the satellite view of the planet, the cracks of the parched earth, fossils of ancient lakes; or, conversely, the slow progress of moulds seen through a glass slide. The macrocosm and the microcosm dialogue, mingle and merge.

Technique and creative process: your 'modus operandi' is beyond fascinating, characterised by a gesturality that seems driven by visceral impulses. You cannot completely control the final result of your paintings: chance, fate and instinct concur in their ultimate realisation.

I do not believe in chance but rather in an emotional set-up and attitude, sometimes even unconscious, that leads us to a certain result. I deeply believe that we are always the silent protagonists of this whole tangled mechanism.

Indeed, the creative process is extremely visceral and instinctive and sometimes the end result is very different from what I had mentally imagined and that is also the beauty of it. Relying on instinct allows us to give space to creative impulses and movements that the rational mind cannot decipher. There is also a pictorial part of precision, and therefore more rational, which is the final part, in which I lift the support vertically and, intervening mainly with black, bring out volumes, shapes and expressions within the magmatic confusion of colours. Control and instinct work together and merge to create something beautiful. It is like finding order in disorder, it is like accepting contradictions that constantly coexist in me. I always seek beauty as a means of healing.

Dreams, hopes, restlessness and emotions: colour always also has a psychological matrix and recalls inner worlds. Your latest production in particular is characterised by a more vivid palette. Does this mutation correspond to a particular phase in your life as a man and artist?

The use of colours is always very instinctive, even though I often, voluntarily or involuntarily, try to create colour dialogues through the juxtaposition of colours that can bring the observer's soul into contact with deep and unknown emotions. Surely this phase characterised by such strong colours represents a moment in my life when I need to pull out courage and grit to make important choices.

The female figures you portray are characterised by unintelligible gazes, sometimes thoughtful and dreamy, sometimes challenging. Your profiles, on the other hand, seem to peer into unexplored horizons. Tell us about the women you bring to light.

The feminine I bring to light evokes and embodies human ability to get in touch with the most intimate and deepest parts of their own soul. It represents the archetype of intimacy, delicacy and sensitivity, which lives in every human being, male or female: a sort of Dantean journey into the Underworld of the soul, where rationality vanishes in the midst of a universe of magma and mud. Getting in touch with our darkest sides means getting seriously involved and really listening to ourselves, it means facing our demons, getting soiled and dirty up to our necks to come out with a diamond in our hands. I deeply believe that a vertiginous descent into the deepest places of our soul is the only possible way to evolve and improve ourselves as people. With my faces, I metaphorically represent through the skin all the emotional processes that take place within those unexplored worlds. A skin that tells like a geographical map every latitude of our deepest and most intimate selves. An introspective journey that points its finger at the crooked and subtle edges of our ego. Because it is right there inside that the bud of everything that will happen outside is born. Deep and direct glances, at other times elusive and distant, manifest hidden universes.  Cracks of colour that open in a space where everything dissolves, perhaps to make way for a better future.