Biography
Biography
Gabriele Casale was born in Latina on the 5th of January 1982. After obtaining the Secondary Education Certificate with scientific orientation at LiceoScientifico "E. Majorana" of Latina, he attended the Accademia di Belle Arti (Academy of Fine Arts) of Rome. In 2005, he graduated in fine art painting, cum laude, with a thesis on Hyperrealism.
From 2001 to 2009, he cooperated, in the field of mosaic, with the spiritual art atelier of Centro Aletti in Rome. Currently, he paints and makes mosaics.
Artist Statement
My main medium is painting. I began studying painting by tackling the basics first and such rigorous path, then, proved crucial to the development of my job. As I went along, I increasingly understood what elements of painting interest me the most. The line, the sign, the colour, the rhythm and the movement have become the protagonists of my work. My work has gradually changed as I moved from figurative art to fully abstract painting. The different painting techniques, which I have been using from time to time, have led, by virtue of their intrinsic language, to the creation of an assortment of works, which are, nonetheless, linked by the same research.
My works, also the most blatantly abstract ones, always evoke the natural world. As Klee would say, my work is “abstract with some recollection”; this statement would always struck me until I embraced it fully. I am interested in nature because we should feel as one with it. I do not think that nature is only benign in itself but I believe that we should re-establish an intimate relationship with it. It surprises us, its mystery astonishes us, it even hits us hard but it stays an essential “fact” for every living being. With my work, I try to express the bond that has always existed between the man and the world outside himself.
Over the years, I have been much influenced by my cooperation with the Jesuit artist Marko I. Rupnik and by mosaic art. In this respect, I may describe my paintings as mosaic-inspired and musical. The forms unfolding on the canvas, as to say the pieces of those painted “mosaics”, may also be interpreted as musical compositions made up of images. It was important to meet the different souls of the culture of Eastern Europe at the Centro Aletti’s atelier. My background of images and suggestions was enriched by the inputs coming from the language, which is still spoken, that we define asbyzantine. I have metabolised and revived the symbols of Russian, Serbian and Ukrainian icons in my work, through the filter of western culture. Thus were born the installations expressing, in the synthesis of my sign, different cultures.
(trad. Claudia Marchetti)
