AT: Where are you from and how/why you start engaging to art?

CB: I come from Potenza Picena, a small town in the Marche but I live and work in Naples. I have never rationally decided to engage in Art. Art has always been and still is an impelling need, a way to take in order to transform what I had and felt within into something else. Art was a sort of purification ritual which started about five years ago, when I first had problems with my eyesight. It was exactly that the moment when I started pondering about the reality around me and I felt an irrepressible will to narrate what I felt and saw, far beyond the physical dimension of reality, it was and has always been a compulsory, indispensable way to go through. It was an incredibly strong feeling which found its expression and freedom in images, no matter what their final shapes would be like.

AT: When did it become serious?

CB: Certainly from that moment onward.It all started in 2015, but I understood it would become my work when I met Gian Marco Casini and started to work for his Gallery in Leghorn.

AT: Are there any person that have been significant in your progression as an artist?

CB: Yes, definitely. In 2016 I met Roberto Capponi, a collector from Macerata after a chance meeting between Roberto Capponi and my father. Roberto went to my father’s business to mail a piece of work and they started speaking. Roberto said he was a collector, very keen on art and my father somehow told him what I was doing. Once back home Roberto started to inquire about me and soon after he called my father again saying he wanted to meet me and have a studio visit. I didn’t have a proper studio at that time, so my mother and I organised a sort of art exhibition in the sitting room of our home : there my first acquisition, and the starting point of all that followed. Roberto and his family have always supported me and are still doing so. They introduced my work to other collectors and presented me to Gian Marco Casini.

AT: What is your first approach to the work? Could you describe your practice?

CB: At the beginning of my artistic experience I painted but when I later realised that colours could not render what I was looking for I gave up painting. My health problems have definitely influenced my personal, artistic research and my work choices. The concept of absolute transparency and the desire to render the invisible visible have been the basis for my first works and keeping them in mind all my successive projects have taken life. I think, in fact, that they refract the kaleidoscopic aspects of these themes, focusing more and more on the transience, caducity and stratification of time and space and on their mutual relation. I cannot give a precise definition of my technique since I use a selection of them and different materials according to the message or concept I wish to communicate, ranging from sculptures to video installations and site specific projects.

AT: What do you want to reach with your work?

CB: My work is a close investigation on perceptive limits. It is a deep and open investigation since the final aim is to create a silent dialogue with all those who get in touch and relation with them. My works do not give final, definitive solutions: they introduce and present the infinite possibilities to go beyond the concept of limitation.
They are to be used to listen to and go beyond the physical, sensory, mental barriers of our souls.

AT: What are your favourite tools and materials for working?

CB: As I have let you guess,I do not prefer any individual, specific tool or material . They are only instruments, means I use to give shape to my expressive needs.

AT: How do you feel while you are working? You think of the final result?

CB: Before laying my hands on any possible type of material or object , I go through a long phase of reflection and research during which I stop, elaborate and develop ideas and projects. Here lies the most emotional side
of my personality and creativity which, instead, I try to veil or hide in the finished pieces of work, where I do my best to give the observer meaningful spaces, possibly free from my own feelings and emotions. The carrying out phase is basically a technical, practical one where I try to put pieces together, giving the work a fine balance between shape and content. More than on the final result, I concentrate on the ultimate objective, on the message I want to communicate. Shape gets its final definition in between.

AT: How do you understand when a work is finished?

CB: You understand it! You feel it!

AT: Where does the inspiration for the work come from?

CB: From sounds and from words. From the invisible and from the imperceptible.

AT: There are any artists who influenced your works? Why?

CB: Piero Manzoni was certainly my undisputed master with his great ability in formal and conceptual synthesis. Boetti was important to me in his enigmatic vein, and then all the greatest masters of conceptual and minimal art.

AT: How important is for you the role of social media?

CB: I am well aware they have a basic role, but my most meaningful meetings and occasions originated from real happenings and personal meetings, therefore I do not rely on media so much.
I use them to promote events and publicize my work but real , personal networking is more important to me.

AT: What is your opinion about the contemporary art system nowadays from your point of view as an artist?

CB: I think I am a lucky person because, so far, I have only met professionals who share my same love for Art.
I am also aware there are unpleasant realities that we, the artists, need to be away from, keep apart and guard against. Choices are basic, above all if you are young and at the beginning of a professional career.

AT: What do you find to be the most challenging or daunting thing about pursuing art? What is the most rewarding part of working as an artist?

CB: Art is a stimulus to pursue Art and the gratification deriving from watching your ideas get shape and form allows you to overcome transitory demoralization.

AT: What do you do outside of art?

CB: I live my life exactly like everybody else.I go out with my friends, cuddle my cat Time and, whenever possible, I go and see my family. In the meanwhile, to cover the costs I have ,I work in a handicraft beer house in Naples.

AT: What are your goals and expectations for the future?

CB: I never wonder about the final shape of my works in their earliest stages, and, very much in the same way, I live my life. What I consider really important is to be concentrated on and well connected with present time and reality. Future is the manifestation of the” hic et nunc”, of the “here and now”.

Clarissa Baldassarri (b. 1994) is an Italian visual artist currently living and working in Naples, Italy.

Her research is an investigation of perceptual limits. It is an open investigation, since it aims at establishing a silent dialogue with those who are comes into contact. The works do not provide absolute solutions, but present the infinite possibilities of overcoming the concept of limit. They are aids that can be used to look and listen beyond physical sensory barriers.

The concept of transparency and the desire to make the invisible visible were the bases on which the first works were developed and from which the projects came to life. subsequent that refract, in more detail, the kaleodoscopic aspects of these themes, paying more and more attention to the transience and stratification of the
time and space and their correlation.

His works use different materials and expressive techniques depending on the message, a concept to communicate ranging from sculpture to video installation and site specific projects.

PORTFOLIO