This work appears to be an abstract painting: on a uniform black ground are small colored rectangles: yellow, red, blue. In fact, it represents Chicago by night in an extremely synthesized image tied to Sassu’s direct experience of the forms and rhythms of the American metropolis. Leaving aside this surprising formal solution, more or less unique in his painting, the work fits into a thematic vein that continues through all of Sassu’s production, from the first images of the urban periphery and landscape of the 1930s to his later city scenes like Piazza San Babila of 1957 and La strada grande of 1960.