SAMUELE MASSARO
This gallery of famous people, of timeless icons imprinted in the collective imagination is from this glossy universe from which Samuele Massaro takes the subjects of his paintings. Like magazine covers with the faces of celebrities, they enact a sort of “twilight of the gods”, returning leading figures from the worlds of art, cinema, and music to a simple, genuinely human plane. They are names that need no introduction: from Sophia Loren to Janis Joplin, from Marcello Mastroianni to Salvador Dalì. What is more, in this case, they conquer a new identity, one truer and closer to a common feeling and o those emotions that affect everyone regardless of rank or class. His colors make it possible for these stars to “metamorphose” into people like many others. These men and women symbolize feelings, joys, and passions through the variously modulated intensity of alternating bright or dark colors and the rhythmically variegated brushstrokes that divide, extend, and decompose the faces, making them one with the surrounding space. It is a way to impart movement and hence vitality to the faces “carved in stone” by the media, returning them once again to “life” and able to tell stories far from the clichés previously seen and announced. Massaro's art renews, changes, and transforms, providing us with faces already familiar to us and whose interpretation nonetheless shows them resurrected in a new light.
[Daniela Pronesti']
www.samuelemassaro.com