MELTING POT
Solo exhibition by Enzo Casale
Curated by Alberto Dambruoso
18 September - 24 October 2026
PROSA contemporanea
Via Marin Sanudo 24, Rome
Opening: Friday, 18 September 2026, 6:30 pm
PROSA contemporanea presents Melting pot, a solo exhibition by Enzo Casale, curated by Alberto Dambruoso, opening on 18 September and running through 24 October 2026. The exhibition is part of the eleventh edition of RAW - Rome Art Week.
The title Melting pot evokes the idea of a cosmopolitan society in which individuals of different origins, cultures, religions and experiences come together and coexist. Rather than suggesting a process of assimilation, the exhibition explores the possibility of a shared identity founded on difference, coexistence and mutual recognition.
This idea of transformation and coexistence lies at the heart of Enzo Casale’s painterly practice. In his work, painting becomes an open and fluid space in which distinct forms, identities and sensibilities encounter one another, overlap and undergo transformation. The melting pot thus becomes not only a social and cultural condition, but also a metaphor for the very nature of painting.
At the centre of Casale’s work is the human figure, understood as an open territory inhabited by multiple identities, tensions, vulnerabilities and desires. His figures resist any notion of fixed or definitive identity. They appear instead to exist in a state of transition, suspended between what is revealed and what remains concealed; between individual and collective identity; between the need to recognise oneself and the possibility of becoming something else.
Casale’s painting consequently moves across a shifting threshold between presence and disappearance, definition and dissolution. The figure may emerge with clarity, its features carefully articulated, or gradually dissolve into the pictorial surface until it becomes almost unrecognisable. This constant tension between figuration and abstraction becomes a powerful reflection on the human condition itself: on the identities we choose to reveal, those we protect, and those that remain in a state of becoming.
As curator Alberto Dambruoso writes, Casale’s works reflect both autobiographical elements and the existential condition of the many figures he portrays at times stripped of their faces and reduced to pure silhouettes: “profiles of ordinary people we encounter every day.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Enzo Casale lives and works in Rome. After graduating in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts, he attended the Academy of Costume and Fashion, where he began collaborating with several fashion designers and creating collections for major knitwear and garment manufacturers.
In 2003, Casale returned to painting full-time, developing a personal practice centred on the human figure and the question of identity. His visual language moves between a vigorous, forceful mark and a more delicate, intimate dimension, exploring the complexity of individual experience and the possibility of inhabiting identity and sexuality beyond traditional categories.
His subjects, often withdrawn into their own silence, emerge through a language that shifts between direct imagery and more intimate, understated narratives, between the physical gesture of painting and the evocative dimension of poetry. Casale embraces figuration while subjecting it to processes of reinterpretation and deformation that draw on the legacy of European Informalism. His work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad.
Recent exhibitions include his 2025 solo exhibition at Palazzo Izzi in Fondi, curated by Alberto Dambruoso, as well as Sfigurazione (2023), Identità Dipinte and Trasparenze (2022), also curated by Dambruoso. He has participated in major exhibitions and artistic projects in Rome, Rovereto, Rende, Berlin and New York.
In 2015, Casale was an artist-in-residence at BoCs Art in Cosenza with the association I Martedì Critici. His works are held in public and private collections.
Melting pot
Enzo Casale is a painter who, since the beginning of his career, has based his artistic research on the representation of the human figure, which he has skilfully explored from both a psychological and an anthropological perspective. After more than thirty years of painting, the artist has created an almost endless gallery of contemporary portraits that reveal his way of relating to others and, more broadly, to society.
In Enzo Casale’s painting and, consequently, in his way of understanding the world, there is room for everyone: different cultures, ethnicities, languages and colours coexist peacefully within his works, without distinctions or hierarchies, in a space founded on mutual recognition. His painting thus becomes a “melting pot” in which, as in the exhibition presented here, images of people from all over the world are brought together.
Yet the figures that populate his paintings should be read not only in their collective dimension, but also as individual human beings. In this respect, Casale seeks to bring out the identity of each figure, together with the weight of the positive and negative experiences accumulated throughout their lives.
Some portraits therefore seem to convey resolute and, in certain cases, even outspoken personalities, while others reveal a certain melancholy in which vulnerabilities are perhaps concealed. These emotions are conveyed solely through painting, which Casale bends to his needs according to what he intends to represent.
Thus, the figures in his paintings may be constructed through a clear definition of the face and its details when he seeks to convey a particular sense of confidence in the person portrayed. Conversely, they may undergo transformations that cause the painting itself almost to dissolve, rendering the figure nearly unrecognisable when he intends to express uncertainty or fragility.
This oscillation between figuration and abstraction, this transitional dimension, also reflects the human condition, suspended between an identity that must be revealed and another that we instead tend to conceal and keep for ourselves. Seen from this perspective, these barely sketched figures, worn away by colour, occupy that subtle threshold between appearing and disappearing, instilling uncertainty and doubt in the viewer’s own perception.
From a formal standpoint, Casale’s painting has also undergone changes over the years as a result of the various pictorial techniques he has experimented with. While the common thread of his research is, as already mentioned, the representation of the human figure, another defining characteristic of his work lies in his experimentation with colours, fabrics and techniques more generally, which can sometimes generate different versions of the same figure.
Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Frosinone, Casale received a classical education and, in fact, his works draw inspiration from the major avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, such as Informalism, identifiable in those materially textured figures tending towards abstraction, and Cubism, which can be clearly recognised in the works created through collage, where fragmented faces sometimes take on monstrous forms.
Yet Casale has also succeeded in merging painting with one of the passions that has accompanied him since childhood: fashion. This is why his works often incorporate particular fabrics, more commonly found in haute couture ateliers than in art studios. Many of the models for his paintings, moreover, come from the world of fashion and are often captured during fashion shows.
Colours, pencils and gold leaf enable him to conceptualise anatomical parts and fragments of faces that might appear purely aesthetic but, when used to redesign a new face or parts of it, acquire their full meaning through recomposition.
The same cut-outs, copied and enlarged in a kind of patchwork, resemble enormous plasters used to suture wounds. Regular lines heighten the drama of the visual process of fragmentation and reassembly of the faces depicted in their doubling.
Thread becomes another means of recomposing fractures, reconnecting torn edges: it is both a protective net and a net that traps you. Vertical or horizontal lines are often superimposed on the faces in his works, forming grids reminiscent of a cage: a way of exorcising the sense of claustrophobia from which the artist suffers.
At the same time, however, the thread drawn across the canvas takes him back to his earliest lessons in drawing, given to him by his mother, who, when he was a child, encouraged him to use hatching to draw fruit and other objects found around the house. Casale’s works therefore reflect both autobiographical aspects and the existential condition of the many figures he portrays, sometimes emptied of their faces and reduced to pure silhouettes. They are profiles of ordinary people whom we encounter every day. The attempt undertaken in Enzo Casale’s painting is to discover different “truths” from those that things appear to reveal truths that are often evident and, for the most part, taken for granted. The artist seeks to bring out what lies within the people he portrays, deep inside them: their inner life, in other words, made not only of happiness and carefree moments, but also and perhaps increasingly so in our present society of opposing feelings such as loneliness and anguish. These are people who may pass unnoticed by most, but certainly not by Casale’s sensitive eye, which is capable of restoring their humanity to us, even when, as mentioned above, it is a suffering humanity. I believe this is where the value of his painting lies: in the way ethics and aesthetics merge into a single entity.
Alberto Dambruoso
INFORMATION
18 September - 24 October 2026
The gallery is open Monday to Friday,
4:00-7:00 pm, and by appointment.
Admission free
PROSA contemporanea
Via Marin Sanudo 24, Rome
prosa.studiolab@gmail.com
+39 338 4858 398
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