Renata Cassiano
El Acaso, El Quizá, El Sin Embargo y El No Obstante
Hand built, high fire glaze casting, carving
2017
$800
Statement:
Selfhood, my own and of the people around me is still a provoking enigma, is like encountering a dead animal on the road, raw, inside out and undefined. It is not possible to tell what it used to be, or what it will become, but it invokes a curiousness and awakens a sort of scientific eagerness.
My sculptures explore, through the language of abstraction, the construction of identity as a fluid structure that constantly transforms, constituted of gender, race, language, experience, environment and geography. I conceive selfhood as an inner sinew, a cultural connecting tissue engulfed by experience, place and time and encased by the skin of memory. In the sculptures, glaze takes the place of flesh and blood, activating the piece which by the ceramic process becomes a sentient being. This entity contracts and expands, breaths, moves and gestures; sometimes the energy within is so vivid that it bursts out, ripping through the clay skin. By cutting into them, like an archeologist of the sinew, I begin to understand the transformations within, the defined but most importantly, the undefined.
“El Acaso, El Quizá, El Sin Embargo y El No Obstante” references those inner landscapes, many times invisible to ourselves. Because a better understanding of the people around us comes from a true introspection, an honest look within.


Bio:
Renata Cassiano is a Mexican-Italian artist born in Mexico City. Cassiano works predominantly in the medium of clay but her background in painting and drawing takes a big part in her ceramic practice. Educated in Mexico and the US, she has had the opportunity to work in different clay environments from a ceramics factory in the north of Italy, a residency center in Denmark and with artists such as Nina Hole and Gustavo Perez. Her work has been exhibited in Mexico, USA, Denmark, Cuba, Japan and Hungary and can be found in public collections in Taiwan, Germany, Denmark, Latvia and Slovenia.
insta: @renatacassiano