IVA CASSON’S PERSONAL EXHIBITION AT ARMAN. WATERCOLORS ON THE LAGOON.

The charm of the Lagoon and of its islands that stretch out towards the open sea revives in Iva Casson’s works in a sublime way, an artist who naturally moves from oil to watercolour technique, to capture moments and situations of landscapes feeding on the light veiled by the reflection of the sky on water. And in each of her exhibitions we are surprised by the lightness and poetry of her works. As for her latest personal exhibition at Arman in Treviso, where she presented thirty paintings mostly dedicated to Pellestrina island. A Pellestrina far from the traffic of the mainland, where even the fishermen barges seem to move quietly in the hushed brightness, and yet real and swarming with life in which nature shows all its beauty. This is natural for an artist who lives close to Chioggia to prefer the watercolour technique for her works in the open air. A technique that requires immediacy and accuracy without allowing any changes of mind, but letting us understand and capture the shades that the hours of the day give to the lagoon as a present.
The soft atmosphere of rosy dawns, the bright sunshine at noon, which emphasise the outline of the houses and bell towers against the horizon, the gold of the sunset that lights up the sea with the glistering reflections to soothe with shades of green, brown and violet in the early evening. As well as the succession of seasons : in the awakening of the spring that fills the arabesque of the sandbanks with soft colours like in the lightening of summer noons emphasizing the shady spaces, in the vibrant polychromies of the autumnal sunsets like in the cold winter light. In a succession of visions which “tell us”, together with the landscape and its variations, thoughts and emotions , through the cleansing of the soul”. She is concerned for the thin marking, for the features characterizing the environment, for the transparencies of the hazes, for the combination of shades that seem to accompany the lightness of a musical andante. The same but more exuberant and brighter palette that Iva Casson uses for the flowers and for the still lifes or into which, even "capturing" the same landscape and spots of the island, she dips her paintbrush for the materialistic colours of the oils.

Vittoria Magno
[from the Magazine "TREVISO c'è" n. 6 / 2003]