Silvio Lacasella (Trento 1956)

Silvio Lacasella was born in Trento in 1956. He soon settled in Vicenza, where he now lives and works. From 1977 through the 1980s, mainly at the impulse received from Tono Zancanaro, he gave himself over to etching. His assiduous practice of the technique – nearly 350 plates produced – made him one of the Italian masters of the new generation. He has exhibited his etchings around Italy and abroad (in Brussels and Amsterdam, among other places). During this period his etchings were marked by the contrast between a plane closer to the viewer, characterized by harsh barriers and lacerated architecture, and a background taken up by windswept, disturbed slices of bare landscape.
In 1988 Lacasella began to take up painting, which in the end totally supplanted etching in his opus. By comparison with etching, his painting inclined to a simpler “figure” concentrated mainly on the idea of landscape, dropping the earlier spatial contrasts and replacing memories of the past (Romanticism, above all, and late-Renaissance) with a pervasive sense of melancholy before the spectacle of nature. He began to exhibit even more widely, especially in Italy, and many of the country’s leading critics took notice of his work. A major retrospective was held in 2009 by the City of Vicenza in the contemporary art space of the Basilica Palladiana.