Collection: Casassola and Dark Matter.

 Dark Matter.

But the density of this matter
conditions our destiny
between a slow cosmic solitude
and the beat of billions of years
of a pulsating universe
that dies first and then begins anew.
(….)
The essential lies beyond appearances
beyond the event horizon
where even time does not exist
it lies in the dark matter
of the ink from which
this writing of mine is made.

Gianni Darconza

“Dark matter is the seed of becoming,

in the shadows lies the essence of the human soul

because it is there that silence beats

awaiting the breath of life,

the explosion that will produce light”

Enmanuel Lasker.

“It’s time to get rid of all that dust 

that has aged your heart muscle”

“where else will you take but the ruins and the remains and the rubble 

 all that dark matter that paralyzes your heart?”.

Carlos Villacorta

The term Dark Matter designates, in the field of cosmology, a hypothetical form of matter that would constitute approximately ninety percent of the total mass of the universe, but which remains invisible due to its lack of interaction with light. Its existence is inferred solely through its effects: a faceless gravitational force, a presence without an image, a structure without form. This notion—unstable and fascinating—constitutes the conceptual starting point for Raúl Casassola's new series of paintings, who appropriates the term not to illustrate scientific phenomena, but to interrogate the dark, invisible, and elusive zones of human experience.

In this project, the scientific metaphor is transformed into a poetic and ontological platform. Casassola proposes a territory where pictorial matter struggles between revealing and concealing, where the image emerges as a luminous event within a dense, profound, and abstract field that sustains it. Painting thus becomes a reflection on what cannot be seen but, nevertheless, holds the structure of the world together: that which has no body or form, but without which nothing would manifest itself.

The first approach to these works inevitably refers to the funerary portraits of El Fayum, made in Greco-Roman Egypt between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD. Those faces—frontal, intensely present, fixed in a gaze that transcends time—aspired to accompany the deceased into eternity. Their function was liminal: they were situated between the world of the living and that of the dead, between what is seen and what remains hidden.

Casassola's paintings dialogue with this tradition not from a literal quote, but from a profound affinity: the idea of the portrait as a threshold, as a condensation of memory and matter, as a point of contact between two dimensions. In both practices, one perceives the power of the gaze that challenges, the emotional density of a face that does not fully belong to our time and, above all, the presence of a background that is not a simple accompaniment, but a symbolic space charged with tension and meaning.

In Dark Matter, the figure emerges from a background that is not a mere support, but an active, vibrant, almost telluric mass. The dark, stratified, and dense paint creates an environment in which the image struggles to assert itself. It is not a violent struggle; it is the representation of a process: the instant in which a form encounters the possibility of existing.

The light—which in these paintings seems to emanate from within the matter rather than illuminating it from outside—gives the faces a sculptural character. It is a light that models, that invites a slow reading, that configures a presence that asserts itself within the abstract chaos that surrounds it. This relationship between figure and background articulates the central dialectic of the project: the visible and the invisible as complementary forces, each necessary for the existence of the other.

The use of the concept of Dark Matter suggests an approach to territories bordering between science and metaphysics. Quantum physics, which describes a world where matter can be energy, probability, or vibration, introduces notions that escape everyday logic and demand new forms of imagination. Casassola finds a fertile field here: the idea that reality is vaster, more complex, and more mysterious than we can perceive. However, the artist does not convert the scientific reference into a mere conceptual nod. His work appeals to an emotional and spiritual plane: it suggests that there are areas of being—memory, desire, fear, identity—that operate as internal dark matter, invisible forces that shape our perception of the world. The portraits in Dark Matter seem to meditate on this double condition: that of the individual as a concrete presence and, at the same time, as a territory of inaccessible depths. In this tension lie the strength and symbolic power of the series.

After a prolonged dedication to public spaces through large murals, Casassola returns to the studio and embarks on a process of introspection and concentration. This shift from exterior to interior transforms his practice. The monumental is replaced by the intimate; the expansive, by the condensed. Painting becomes an exercise in introspection and discovery, an exploration of territories that do not seek to describe the visible world, but to penetrate the strata that sustain it. This new stage involves an approach to pictorial matter as a living, changing organism, endowed with symbolic resonances. The artist works with patience and superimposition, allowing the paint to become a space of progressive revelation.

Although the series may establish dialogues with baroque references—due to its dramatic lighting or its expressive treatment of matter—its spirit aligns more clearly with a medieval sensibility: one in which the work of art was understood as a vehicle toward a greater reality, not as an affirmation of individual authorship. In this sense, Dark Matter does not seek to portray concrete subjects, but to allude to a universal human condition.

The work is inscribed in that continuum where figure and abstraction are not opposites, but different moments of the same creative gesture. Casassola's faces seem to exist halfway between presence and dissolution, between body and symbol, between life and transcendence.

Each painting is situated on the threshold of what can be named. The image offers itself as a question, not as an answer. In this sense, Dark Matter can be understood as an invitation to dwell on what usually remains relegated: what has no form but conditions all forms; what is not seen but sustains the visible; what is not explained but gives meaning. And if I began with some verses, now I end with very specific ones, those of the Greek poet Odyseas Elytis, verses that could preside over this series: "I have something transparent and incomprehensible to say, like the song of a bird in times of war."

Curatorial Text: Rafael Doctor Roncero.