Thousand Years in Silence at Biasa Art Ubud is Marco Cassani’s second solo show in Bali. It presents the artist’s still life works and recent drawings from the series, which lent the show its title.

Marco Cassani has been focusing on creating still life in his artistic oeuvre for more than a decade. Separated by thousands of kilometers from his native country Italy, in his Bali based studio practice Cassani kept going an imaginary artistic dialogue with Italian Masters like Giorgio Morandi or Giorgio de Chirico; his predecessors in art. The secluded, solitary aura radiating around their works greatly inspired Marco Cassani’s interest in the genre of still life.

Known for his artworks dealing mainly with the idea of transformation, social sculpture and the concept of the ready-made, domestic objects, found in his direct personal surrounding function as models for Cassani’s art.

In the show Thousand Years in Silence the title operates as a mental framework for how the artworks interact with each other. They are connected through a complex underlying structure of thoughts that come out from the same source: the sacred fountains of Bali, where the artist literally collects most of his “art supplies”. The metal of collected wish coins physically forms the primary substance for all of Cassani’s three-dimensional works.

Universal Ritual
The ritual of throwing coins, while making a secret wish, as an ancient Roman tradition has always been familiar to Marco Cassani, being native Italian. Although in Bali Cassani is very much intrigued by the spiritual element of throwing wish coins as well as the universal character thereof, he is most and foremost captured by the hidden and unspoken collective memory of a society that maintains connection with its past for various underlying motives; primarily preservation of communal identity and political as well as economical awareness, and, as he was able to encounter over many years of collecting the coins, the creation of a certain optimistic charisma. Through transformation and recycling the wish coins into a substance for the art, Cassani transforms the hope carried by the wish.

The appearance of Marco Cassani’s recent drawing series is free from narrative elements. It is, at the same time, sensual and monumental of character. The drawings in Thousand Years in Silence can be considered the shadows of his existing still life works. He drew them literally based on memories of the ideas of those particular art objects. Thus, Marco Cassani, as it were, is attempting to freeze the silence in the void of his existence as an artist; the outsider offering possible common value carried by domestic objects that form the significant subject in his artistic practice.

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