Richard Cascioli

 

 

After earning a degree in construction and design, Richard Cascioli spent 20 years working with classic construction and design elements, mastering the use of structural materials.  His bold use of steel and iron as extended canvasses is derived from a fascination with metal shields from midievel period, and the struggle with the external and interior forces of darkness which that period  mirrors for us in present time.

 

Cascioli’s themes portray what lies hidden behind our armor:  the intimate fight of the soul to be set free from its bondage.  His work expresses the intervention of the divine in the subject’s reclamation, depicting cycles of physical bondage, resistance, surrender and salvation.  The pieces may also evoke the sensation of peering through gothic doors, in which the observer is drawn into the darkness of the spirits descent—a place we often wish to avoid experiencing.

 

Our reward for venturing into this darkness with the artist is a lifting of the heart from the dungeons of our own failures and combats with life, to the mystical light of the intervening rescue from the dark hells of our pasts.  The artist’s pieces are constructed symbolically, magnifying the stories told by central images—for example, the mottled surface of the steel canvas mirroring the battered struggle for freedom: the positioning of the accoutrements reflecting the diminishing or the flourishing of the soul’s movement toward release.

 

Cascioli brings an exquisite strength to his stories of our enslavements, grief and redemption.  He illuminates for us our inner struggle with what seems to chain us, what seems unaltered.  His ultimate revelation to us is gifted in the very nature of the materials themselves---that even steel will bend to serve us, that the effervescent nature of life itself will meet us in our own surrender.

 

He is showing us that regardless of the perceived solidity of our circumstances, transformation is possible, and in our recognition of this truth the divine rises out of the ethers to meet us.

                                                                             

                                          -JoAnneh Nagler