...Emblematicly,“Trapecista”/“Ttight
rape walker”, by Rubén Sassano, is almost
a game of tightroupe walker characters that gests around
the abyss and the urban spaces as way of a roller-coaster.
Book
from the bank Adriana Laurenzi
To
the point of view of the phenomenology, the space is
the category that brings to the human, the understanding,
the arrangement and the relations with the objects.
So, the space is the first condition of a subject that
orgarnizes the world perception to understand it, to
activate over the subject and brings it a motive to
their action.
The
space, as the conscience, is the time too.
All
landscape is a look, a particular look of the space.
The
Rubén Sassano‘s opera is centred on the
configured space as landscape.
Far
from the genre traditional canons, his landcape introduces
us into a fiction, into an imaginary space that reflects
the atmosphere and, fundamentally, a city spirit : Buenos
Aires.
Our
space intuitions depend much of the city space where
we were lived; in this way, Gastón Bachelart,
defines it in his “Poetic of the Space”.
The
conscience space can reflect, with the imagination,
a cosmovision full of senses.
At
the Sassano‘s landscape, the urban geography as
a historic flux stage mixes, with a poetic view of a
melancholic key of chiaroscuro.
We
can compare his images, with similar atmospheres of
Cortazar‘s urban narrations, as the Piazzola‘s
melancholic melodies.
As
the tango, an urban music, the Sassano‘s landscapes
are urban ones too. Those landscapes are big constructions
that evoke the iron modernist structures, linked to
the mechanization and to the industry.
The
utopian and fantastic architectures, created by the
Italian drawer, Giovanni Piranesi (1720-1778), known
as “Carceri”¬, inspires Rubén, another
urban prisions taht sentences the regular citizen without
the necessity of the knock . As the Italian master views,
Sassano traces, with his pencil, his black and coloured
charcoals and his ink, big structures of a circular
geometry that links itself and generates and inter-waved
weft of bug spaces.
The
poetic landscape of Sassano is not inspired in city
centre neighbourhoods; these are inspired in the peripheral
zones, as the Boca one or the railway stations at train
line called “Sarmiento” . His figurative motifs
evoke tension atmospheres, situations that were inspired
by the memory, as the history plot with continuous political
and social crisis.
His
spatial wefts haven‘t the human as protagonist,
but have a giant iron structures as the monumental and
antique bridge from La Boca, a lot if times, represented
by Quinquela Martín. A giant moribund, that since
those times, cuts the visual space of the Riachuelo,
with its impressive iron silhoutte.
Sassano
invites us to a kinetic view similar at the fragmented
and vertiginous perception of the contemporary space,
more linked to a body perception than to the contemplation.
Little
human figures hung of these big iron architectures,
silhouettes as the acrobats, search a balance between
the abysses of the cranes, that link as the roller-coaster
ralls from the amusement parks.
These
big iron structures, that evoke the bridges girders
and the big hangars of the iron architecture of the
modernity, have lost all utopian connotation linked
to the progress idea.
Those
structures imposes a dizzy sense built by a weft with
curves that climb and go to down; the little human figures
hang of this weft, as acrobat subjects, wicth links
that unite the suspended bodies to the metallic structures.
The
population and, specially, the worker classes in the
capitalist modern societies, where the human resource
is dispensable, have suffered the paradigmatic condition
of lack of safety and removal. Inspired by by the acrobatic
and dramatic opera of the “De la Guarda” Argentine
group, Sassano resolved the corporal positions of his
characters thanks to films, videos and a photographic
series, took personally,during the group essays.
The
Ruben‘s operas, in his big size canvases, have
the draw mark too. The structural base of his composition
is the gradation of the lightness and the darkness.
In
his first series the most important resource is the
curve line, as fundamental ordering of the images; in
his recent operas there are Cartesian planes depurations
with straight lines. The contrasts between the lightness
and the darkness are amalgamated by intermediate zones.
He uses first planes to emphasized traces, in opposite
to texturized wefts with open lines which remember thr
sfumato to make the atmospheric sensation used by Leonardo
Da Vinci.
The
Sassano‘s space is, really, a set on of an immeasurably
space where the human being ¬survives¬ into a stormy
machinery that imposes a mechanic movement that threats
all human order.
The
post-modern, irrational and disappointed condittion
appears present in his image. All utopias are sentenced
for the market rules that discard the human as the chess
pieces.
The
plastic labour of his opera surprises to the viewer
in each example of the series, with a constant pivot
between the lines tensions, the strong and dynamic traces
and soft wefts that seems to transfer to the canvas,
the aquatint engraving effects.
His
images are an invitation to transit from dense areas
to the empty ones, to find in the weft, the hidden order
of spatial totality. These fantastic urban views emerge
from the observation and the real register made with
photographic shots took by the own artist, that started
in La Boca and went on in the “Sarmiento”
railway station, line that communicates the Buenos Aires
province with the “Once” terminal station
and pass by the Liniers neighbourhood, where Sassano
grew up and lived in his youth.
City
Bank
Charcoal
over canvas and serigraphy. 0,80 m x 1,20 m.
Sassano
builds a peculiar spatial perspective, framed between
diagonal axises, from top to bottom, dimensioned to the
human figures size, hardly sketched as silhouettes with
shadows.
The
soft weft of the chiaroscuro made with the charcoal
over the canvas is true figurative motif. Is the base
that sustains the cold stage of an urban space, the
downtown where the order and the values are managed
by the finances.
The
humans are just quiet witnesses that fellow the established
rules.
Rubˇn
includes a time far the Gregorian calendar, to introduce
an American time, started wich the fiftieth centenary
of the conquest and the dollar mythic sign in the other
side.
The
artist, who was born in 1960, studied at the Manuel
Belgrano’s School and the Prilidiano Pueyredón’s
School. Actually, he works at the Rogelio Yrurtia’s
School in Buenos Aires. Also, he works at his atelier,
where, from ten years to now, treats the theme about
structures of bridges, cranes, high tension towers and
cables that cross themselves with a poetic interchange
between the air and the iron, re-creating with an original
and personal interpretation; this point of view would
be a modern continuation of the Quinquela Martin’s
opera. The new and the old, the past and the present
of the great years of the industry, abandoned and razed
by the time now.
He
identifies himself with the city; he chooses the gray,
the "mist" from the river and rescues the
atmosphere of the port village.
Bridges
and structures of the train, a lot of times viewed and
lived in his childhood because his travels at the train
line called Sarmiento, are recreated one time
and again in paintings, drawings or engravings, obtaining
in each case a unique result with high beauty. Abstracts
landscapes made with a faithful draw, comparing with
the model. Spontaneous traces with textured planes,
where he feels that must intervene in each part of the
opera. He chooses a colour for the line, then search
the distance clarifying or getting dark it. Sometimes,
little silhouettes appear which reveal us like persons
that hung as a tight-trope walker. So, he creates magical
spaces full of force and subtlety.
Like
his way, in spite of his Italian and Spanish ancestries,
he makes a homage to the natives from this land, when
he remembers in each one of his operas, the genocide
that began with the Columbus arrived; since the October
11th in 1992, when five hundred years passed from that
sad fact, he began to sign his operas dating them from
this day as the number five hundred; actually, he goes
on with this method to date. He has received a lot of
prices for his work.
By
Andrea Lewy Smith 2004.
Translated
by Angeles Crovetto
There
is a constant in the Ruben Sassano’s opera (Bs.As.,
1960) and it is his architectural reference to the structures
that support towers and bridges in Buenos Aires. So,
these elements are "manipulated" to attract
them to his interests: the line converted in curves
and there, the spirals weave a mesh that circulates
through the opera; the mesh becomes a wire net and then
those wires enhanced start to move from ribbons to power
girders. In this way, the old bridge from La Boca,
petroleum chassis and others scaffolds are used like
the point of departure to trace an original map of the
urban landscape.
He
incorporates to the planes, figures contrasted with
the volatility of the spontaneous trace that fill the
near horizons forming nests and volutes that defy the
air. The planes fade away and converge themselves, configuring
lines of landscape images, apart of collapses and ruins
of the hard reality that impact the artist heart.
The
title of this exhibition, mentioning the tango, remembers
and repeats the complex passing that this dance draws
on the floor; the sensuality and the slenderness of
the bodies while they are moving joint by an invisible
melody, like a mobile mirror of those solid constructions
and these others imaginaries that the urban dance recreates.
He
although includes a personal iconography; he used numbers
or characters before; Now, he puts arrows with form
of wedges, a pattern with the Oriental way but with
an American root. The artist, anchored in the anniversary
of the pompous Spanish arrived to America, erroneously
called "discovery", dates the new calendar
and unfold it in opposite way contrasting with the other.
The
zigzag line -between morbid and decisive- receives acrobats
that make pirouettes or pass through dangerous perspectives,
filling those meshes of lines that propose difficult
visual angles. At this time, the lines become spirals
projecting sharp cones, hard stairs to pass to a space
that seems impossible to live.
Sometimes
this mesh becomes tenebrous or asps that bite semi-hide
skies, the weightless mandible. Constellations that
conjugate crossed bodies, constructive frenezi and reflex
continuous.
The
last principal roll of the curve, solid anchorage to
the air perspective that contrasts with another with
a frontal point of view; its warp seems a spider’s
web made by a gloomy spider which with its continuous
trail leaves marks over the wrinkled mesh that, like
the reality, wears changing its forms.
Osvaldo
Mastromauro April /May of the 2003.
Translated
by Angeles Crovetto
Memories
of the end of century
With
his theme Ruben Sassano rescues the cultural elements
which were the essentials to mark the identity of a
port city like our.
The
characteristics of the lines inspired in the iron structure
of the old bridge from La Boca, which a lot of
times Quinquela stamped in his paintings. Now,
in the Sassano’s opera, it remembers to
the shore embraced by the tango from the twenties to
the forties but transforming a refresh of the present
in the power towers of high tension that send energy
to the farms and cities of the country.
The
rail stations, made by the English people in the century
begin, are themes of his opera too; rail stations mixed
with the swarm of antennas and urban buildings. The
development of the cities made that their tentacles
extend and joint themselves like a baroque image with
a great many of arabesques, which this artist transports
with an expressionist slant. "The Relationships"
are "dangerous" because their disquieting
titles and unstable game of black and white in an emphasized
contrast; so the figure appears as a deep cut in the
paper or in the canvas, like the mark that a "Taita"
could show in 1900. This opera doesn’t read easily
but it is the representation of an artist who dives
in the daily to crop up the invisible in a world infested
with a ruinous materialism.
César
Ariel Fioravanti Director of the Museum Luis Perlotti.
1998.
Translated
by Angeles Crovetto
Contemporary
Argentines Ex Libris
Painter
and drawer, Rubén Sassano (Buenos Aires,
1960) is an engraver that connects smartly those disciplines
and offers in his Ex Libris the agility of
a modulated and expressive line with a balanced and
free disposition of the colour. He saturates or neutralizes
chromatically the different zones of his serigraphy’s
work reaching excellent results to his themes, which
contain good humour and irony.
Mauricio
Schvarzman Portaveu de L’associacio Catalana
d’exlibristes - Any XIV, Nro. 27, 2002.
Translated
by Angeles Crovetto
