Fluid fusions of the soul

It is not easy to write on a sheet of paper (and each word that we need to answer) what Nives Marcassoli’s artworks communicate. I speak in the plural because, in the "Ethos area of the Art Gallery" in a meeting with the author and with an audience present for her exhibition, opinions could agree or diverge.
In the end, this is the tribute that art, in this case Nives’s operas, asks us to pay.
Nives Marcassoli uses an undoubtedly unusual technique; a technique that she uses in her laboratory at Pavia where she works and lives. Our artist first draws on glass, then heat fuses her drawings within the glass, she repeatedly melts coloured glass and finally works the surface at a high temperature and continues to smooth and shine her artefacts. Once this process is completed, for everybody’s eyes, Nives glass opera emerges. The glass artefacts are coloured, wanting to witness the phases of the human soul, the emotions of life and the depth of thought. Here before me I have some of her works and those which, in my opinion, perceive certain circumstances of meditation. Are “Caress" and “Serenity" and even "Spark". In addition, what can one say about "Eros" or "Dialogue” and "Balance". Here, for me in this triptych, Nives even manages to touch, and sometimes penetrate, a truly human political speech. In all, addressing her work to an attentive observer, a form of absolute modesty. I would like to return to Nives’s "object-opera". I touch it, I observe a transparent light and boundlessness, I notice that each coloured glass is silent and often conceals a human face. In my opinion, all of these sensations are enclosed in Nives’ artefacts, fulfilment in the absolute sense of the thoughts of our artist.

Liliana Jordan Grosso
February 2017

Translation Linda Susan Johns