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Large Rearing Horse |
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In the years after the war, Sassu
experienced a period of isolation, also because his painting had little in common with the
neo-Cubism à la Picasso which had become the stylistic banner of renewal. He thus devoted himself intensely to work in ceramics, working in Mazzotti’s workshop at Albisola. In this Ligurian town he thus began a period of work - between 1948
and 1960-61 - that was extremely intense, divided between painting, ceramics, murals, and a resumption of sculpture, in which he had first begun to work at the end of the 30s. At that
time his companions in work were mainly Fontana
and Agenore Fabbri.
It was in this period that the motif of the horse in complete autonomy, isolated, that is, from "stories" or
horsemen, was fully taken up again and elaborated, finding in ceramics its ideal field of
application. |
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The battle of
Dien Bien Phu |
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In painting, his dialogue with
world events continued, evoked metaphorically (more paintings of myth and battles) or recounted
directly (The battle of Dien Bien Phu). A tendency towards realism, in harmony with a part of Italian artistic
production in the post-war years, characterizes his work since the beginning of the 60s,
with canvases and wall paintings on themes
connected with work and politics, developed also in an abundant graphic production. This phase of realism in Sassu’s work can be considered concluded with the series of
paintings of 1961 dedicated to the "blues people," while the monumental ceramic
mural called The Myths of the Mediterranean (1992-1993), installed in the new headquarters of the European
Parliament in Brussels, can be considered a recent point of arrival in a program of large
public art. |
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Encinas al sol |
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Above and beyond a continuity of
theme and artistic research, reproposing classical motifs in his painting even in very
recent works, a turning point was reached in 1963, in coincidence with the opening of a
new studio at Cala San Vicente, on the island of Majorca in Spain, where since then Sassu has worked for a good part of every
year. The artist concentrates his attention on some new themes: the bullfight and a
radically renewed landscape painting, characterized by a strong intensification of the
light connected with the particular nature of the places represented. After an interval at the end of the 1960s when the artist attempted further
simplification of his palette to the point of a chromatic flatness, in a controlled return
to the old theme of the urban landscape, richness and sumptuousness of color have once
again become the fil rouge of Sassu’s painting style. In this free and
dazzling explosion of color we find taking concrete form, without intermediaries or
limits, a fundamental idea of the painter’s artistic experience: that, in the end,
"only painting has value." |
