Green of Lilac

The artist was born in Caracas in 1987. He grew up between Pescara and Milan. For the last seven years Casagrande has lived and worked in Los Angeles. The hiatus from ordinary life that the world experienced in 2020 prompted Casagrande to start experimenting again with oil pastels. Hazy sceneries of surreal domesticity become the vivid backgrounds for a series of fictional nude portraits of the artist’s lockdown muses. Vibrant frames that capture and translate into the vocabulary of contemporary art the intimate tie between lust and boredom in the context of domesticity. This body of work stems its roots from the hidden symbologies of Lilac: a flower with an intoxicating scent, a reminder of old love for few and a token of new hope for many, it is the base for most chromatic combinations when using oil pastels. The versatile nature of this pigment encompasses a delicate metaphor about the relationship between desire and action, gesture and canvas.