Marco Casentini: All Around

August 14 – November 6, 2010

All Around features recent work from Italian painter Marco Casentini. Now a resident of Hermosa Beach, Casentini hails from La Spezia, Italy, where a complementary exhibit of the artist is being held at the Centro Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (CAMeC).

Drawing upon an abstract, post-minimalist aesthetic, Casentini’s paintings express a response to landscape and architecture that emanates beneath the hard lines and immaculate surfaces of his compositions, not unlike the “Ocean Park Series” of abstracted landscapes by Richard Diebenkorn. Using super-saturated colors, he references the light of the Italian and Southern California coast. The pieces continue off of the canvas and onto the walls that surround them, integrating the autonomous works into a powerful and unified installation inside of RAM’s Art Alliance gallery that threatens to envelope the tiny viewer in its embrace.

Each painting, whether canvas or wall mural is its own visual experience – and, as Casentini explains, grows from its own reference points. In this exhibit, there are two monochrome works, Landscape In Red and Landscape in Black. “To me, red has always meant passion, eros; black, melancholy; blue, the sky or the sea; and white, peace and quiet,” says Casentini. 

Casentini graduated from the Liceo Artistico in Carrara in 1980, and from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Carrara in 1984. Exhibited widely internationally, Casentini has held significant solo and group shows throughout the United States, Europe and Australia, and was the recipient of the highly regarded Pollock-Krasner Foundation award in 2005. A solo exhibition of Casentini’s work will be presented at the Bakersfield Museum of Art December 9, 2010 – March 6, 2011.