Artist Biography

Elide Cabassi is an Italian classically educated painter who merges classical Italian techniques with Russian techniques of icon painting. Her work is of outstanding quality. She combines beauty, spirituality, compassion and contemplation in a modern format. Looking at her work is like meditating.

After finishing Art Academy in Florence in 1986, she won a scholarship from the Russian Language Institute ’Puskin’ of Moscow. She was suggested by the Cultural office of the Italian Ministry of Foreign affairs as a grant holder, in Moscow, to do research on the Russian avant-garde in the Twenties.

She has been living and working in Russia since 1993.

Foreword by professor Vittorio Strada, to exhibition “Thresholds”, (Italian Institute of Culture, Zurich, 2000). On observing the paintings of Elide Cabassi

“The poetry of silence: does it make sense to thus define a particular pictorial expression, when, generally, painting is pre-eminently a silent art, devoid of articulation of sound, unlike poetry and music? It does make sense if a painting seems to portray the absence of all noise, all disturbance, all agitation; silence, as in quietness, that superior harmony which opens itself to the listener, to meditation, to prayer. To paint silence signifies having to appeal to two dimensions, which transcend the common reality of our immediate surroundings: the interior dimension and the cosmic dimension, or rather, two infinities which go beyond each other’s limits, giving life to a Void which is not non-being, but total Being, in whose unfathomable vastness can only resound the Logos, the Word, interrogation and invocation, dialogue with ourselves and the Other One. Art, in the entirety of its privileged forms, even the sonorous art of music, is the custodian of silence and, as such, protects those who are able to hear it, by going beyond the meagre space of the Ego, out into the boundless space of all Egos, past, present and future, and into that which mysteriously surpasses and embraces them, and which, under various denominations, is called God. The poetry of silence, coursed by the breath of an unfathomable presence, is the poetry which reveals the unspoken and the unspeakable, a poetry in which shapes and colours, figures and outlines, rhythm and harmony, are the emblems of a Whole which is above all else, the icon of a Silence which is Light, Openness, a clearing in the forest, hope in the midst of dereliction.”