Amongst the possibilities that glass offers to those who model glass, Nive Marcassoli’s favourites are two, however antithetic converges: interpretation of transparency and the disappearance of an image immersed in a glass paste. Mostly hands, or body elements, echoes of a human presence, which float within the watery semblance, rippling and changing directions, they merge and become more viscous. Colours flutter with the waves or plunge deeper. There is a strong material component, in the abstruseness of Marcassoli’s choices, occasionally square shaped, as if she were reinventing a post-modern theatrical metope.
The balance of the profile contains a treacly exuberance a venturesome virtue which flees meditation. Hence, the result of a risk excels a mere ornament, caramelising crystalline features of glass. Marcassoli treats these glass compositions rather like panels of 15th century Flemish paintings, as though pursuing to conceal, allowing the underlying layers to emerge within the brightness of the surface. There is also the symbolic value of the hands, in the pursuit to coincide support and contents, through a candid research in which material and figurative fragments merge.
The hands which appear or seemingly recede, speak of their actions, affectionate embraces or loyalty, becoming an arbitrator of fellow beings. The graphical profile immerses within the fullness of the glass, at the same time encompassed by the decisive geometry of its perimeter, or even restrained inside margins of irregularly distributed bubbles.
Because the idea is clear, but its ethical importance is much more complex, as elaborated by Marcassoli’s technique, which accosts drawings and fusion to casting and molten handcrafted creations. The result therefore has an objectified consistency but also pictorial evidence, with the purpose of transmitting a message, whether acknowledged as a memento or to stimulate thoughts.
Marcassoli work style is material, iconic, and conceptual, of sedimentations which grow and increase, sometimes on the verge of excessive, three-dimensional fossil reminisces which reiterating, progressively fade, but not before being eternally impressed.
Silvia Ferrari Lilienau
October 2012