Simona Tavassi

I have been painting since I was a child: I was born into a family of artists and my grandfather, Tommaso Cascella, was my first teacher. In fact, it was he who introduced me to the knowledge and use of oil paint. I therefore started in a traditional way, with the figurative, painting mainly landscapes. The first years of my career, the 70s, were spent researching the study of colour; they are years of travel from India to Afghanistan, from Pakistan, then continuing through Greece and Turkey.

The colors and scents of those places left an indelible mark in my eyes and heart. It is in those places that I discovered the color of pigments and natural earths that will become my means of expression. Since 2000 I have abandoned figuration and, from that moment, color has become my way of expressing myself: pigments allow me to connect to the past, to relive emotional experiences linked to previous lives where crushing, crumbling and mixing powders was the daily activity of the painter; first you look at it, you make it your own and then you start working on it, bringing out its chromatic tone.

Color is my 'guiding spirit', through it I communicate my moods. The architecture of forms and balance are my second teachers: it is through a process of construction and superposition that the work is composed almost autonomously. Painting the linen and jute strips one by one creates an emotional detachment from the composition: it is as if I myself were a spectator of the execution of the work; strip after strip I build my internal landscape: each piece of canvas is like a tile of the entire execution. The places I have visited, everything my eyes have seen and looked at, it is all here in my painting.