Carlo Tassi - Face among the Branches

The iconographic subject of Christ's face has ancient origins and is connected to the legend of Veronica. The episode in which Christ's true features were imprinted on a cloth used by a woman to wipe his face is also recounted in the Gospels. This woman was identified as Veronica, likely due to the similarity with the Latin words "Vera Icon." Since early Christian times, the face of Christ has been the object of particular veneration. Its depiction has pervaded the entire history of Western art. In this work, the artist Carlo Tassi, starting from his typical Symbolist landscapes of branched forests, creates a striking image of Christ's face, where the intertwined branches are identified with the crown of thorns.

Carlo Tassi is a master of Symbolist landscapes. In his views, or even in paintings with more complex subjects, the bare, twisted, and withered tree is the undisputed protagonist. These trees, laden with branches to an incredible degree, are the image of existential complexity, whether standing alone in a sparse landscape or compressed within views of dense, inextricable forests. This Symbolist and existential complexity inherent in Carlo Tassi's trees is also reflected in the technical and formal execution of his works. This artist's style, in fact, stems from a naturalistic vision, but this is transcended into a symbolic dimension through his pictorial application. Carlo Tassi's technique is highly refined in its calligraphic brushstrokes, committed to identifying and describing the arabesque ramifications of his vegetation. Another fundamental characteristic is the density that exploits the qualities of the paint. From a chromatic point of view, Carlo Tassi favours a palette of burnished or opaque colours (derived from the intense study of Rembrandt) in rarefied atmospheres, illuminated by sudden flashes of light.

Carlo Tassi was a painter originally from Bondeno, born in 1933 and died in 2011. Like his father, he studied at the “Dosso Dossi” Art Institute in Ferrara and made his debut at a very young age at the Filò group exhibitions (1952). In the 1950s, his production was characterised by both technical and stylistic research, and he produced oil paintings that, in their post-impressionist synthesis, were close to De Pisis. At the same time, Tassi devoted himself to sculpture: small and large compositions in terracotta and scagliola, with a grainy material connotation. A key period in the artist's biography was 1963: in that year he began the research that would become the distinctive and dominant basis of all his artistic work until his death. Starting from the study of the chiaroscuro relationships of the seventeenth-century masters, especially Rembrandt, he recovers their figurative suggestions, depicting skeletal trees and tavern interiors, imbuing them with a strong material connotation.

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