In Sabrina Casadei’s painting, landscape withdraws from any descriptive or documentary function to assert itself as an atmospheric condition, as a space of resonance between vision and experience. Her works do not depict nature but retain its rhythm, energy and transformation. This is a painting that does not seek to represent the world but to make it vibrate: within it, space and time merge into a fluid, porous matter where every element – light, wind, earth, void – participates in a sensitive unity. Casadei’s research unfolds within a broader reflection on the possibilities of contemporary abstraction, understood not as a denial of reality but as an intensification of the visible. As Gilles Deleuze wrote, «the abstract is nothing other than the real, grasped in its dynamic essence»: in this sense, Casadei’s painting does not renounce the world but distills a latent presence from it – an echo that becomes surface, stratification, flow. Hers is a geography of the imperceptible, where painting becomes a space for the emergence of what usually escapes notice: minimal transformations, atmospheric shifts, the breath of things.
Sabrina Casadei in the studio of the painter Julie Poulain, 2019, ph. Max Tommasinelli, courtesy of the artist
Nomadic by vocation, Casadei has redefined the idea of the studio: no longer a fixed site of production but a mobile form, a relational device, a perceptive threshold. Her “studio” can be anywhere: a room crossed by light, the edge of a fjord, a Roman courtyard, a remote residency between Norway and Iceland. The atelier thus becomes a mental and situated condition, a place for listening rather than planning, where landscape, material constraints and the unforeseen become allies of the pictorial gesture. As in processes of site-specificity, what matters is not so much *where* the work is produced, but *how* space acts upon its form. Casadei’s painting stands in opposition to the velocity of images that saturate the present, and instead proposes an aesthetics of indeterminacy and suspension. In a landscape dominated by the return of figuration – often functional to immediate communication – her practice operates by subtraction: her works require time, silence and a willingness to listen. Far from the rhetoric of individual gesture, her canvases are open perceptual devices, where the human is no longer the center of vision but part of an ecological and cosmic relationship with the environment. Sabrina Casadei invites us to look beyond what is seen, to dwell within the pictorial space as one dwells in a landscape – not to orient oneself, but to be traversed. Her painting is an exercise in presence and loss, a radical practice of attention, capable of holding together world and thought, matter and breath.
Sabrina Casadei’s studio in the countryside of Rome, 2025, courtesy of the artist
Micol Di Veroli: Micol Di Veroli:The concept of “place” in philosophy, has often been associated with the idea of limit or boundary. For someone like you, who has always worked across diverse territories, what does the studio represent today? Is it a fixed point or a mobile dimension that accompanies and stimulates your practice?
Sabrina Casadei: My work has moved through, and continues to move through, multiple places. To think of artists’ studios – historically, and especially those of painters – is to imagine spaces of affection and refuge: stratified studios, archives of collected materials and thoughts, manic order, vertiginous chaos. Since my first years at the academy, I dreamed of having a studio like that. But by nature, I started to travel a lot; and so I needed a light studio, like summer clothes, easy to fold into a suitcase. I’ve been a guest in many different kinds of studios: the studio has also been the shore of a fjord or the courtyard of a palazzo. Until nomadism came to coincide with a return to the countryside around Rome, toward the sea, where I was born. For some time now, my studio has been a space with large windows, filled with wind and light. This place, which currently hosts me, corresponds to me perhaps more than any other I’ve inhabited, each of them important as a fundamental presence in my path of research.
Sabrina Casadei’s studio in the countryside of Rome, 2025, courtesy of the artist
Residencies abroad often represent an experience of “displacement” from the routine and from the usual studio environment. How do you experience this detachment? Have you ever felt that a particular cultural or geographic context resonated in a special way with the themes of your research? For instance, have the landscapes or materials of a place ever found direct transposition in your work?
Inclined toward a nomadic attitude, I have always experienced international residencies as opportunities to engage in dialogue with new places, people and landscape atmospheres. This is an experience that exists in an altered temporality; daily rhythms acquire double or even triple weight, especially when residencies take place in remote locations where nature occupies space and time in an absolute way. It doesn’t intimidate me – on the contrary, I find it stimulating to work in a new space where there are certain constraints regarding available materials. It is precisely from these limitations that broad experimentation and novel lines of research emerge. The residencies that have most deeply shaped my vision have been those immersed in the northern landscapes between Norway and Iceland. There, I felt I had found a rhythm symbiotic with my painting, an intrinsic, primordial correspondence. When a dialogue that profound is woven with a place, my vision moves beyond the canvas and approaches the environment through installation-based interventions. These sewn installations, like painting itself, are formed through observation of place, by deconstructing reality and reworking it.
Sabrina Casadei’s studio in the countryside of Rome, 2025, courtesy of the artist
In your painting practice, nature does not manifest through descriptive or mimetic representation but emerges as a fluid, evocative and often undefined entity, where light, matter and atmosphere seem to dissolve the boundaries between space and form. How does your work relate to the concept of landscape, not only in visual terms but also in terms of perception, memory and temporal layering? Could your painting be read as a reflection on the relationship between humans and the environment, eluding the rhetoric of explicit figuration to instead offer a more sensorial and experiential vision of the natural world?
If I look back a few years, my work included the form – or the formation – of a recognizable landscape. But eventually, that form began to feel limiting. It could no longer contain the power of Nature, its mutability and transience. I remember very clearly (I was on a residency in Norway, a crucial step in my journey) when I began to develop a different gaze, visualizing the landscape as if I were painting it from behind, starting from its atmospheric matrix. Training this vision allows me to work through simultaneous spatial and temporal layers, embracing that fluid entity you mentioned – which feels very close to how I experience things. The flows that animate this movement are part of a process of experimentation and inquiry into (and around) pictorial matter. The material interprets the mutability of nature, responds to it, emulating the opposing forces that bring it to life. In my painting, I try to project the movement of the world: material and abstract, visible and invisible, physical and spiritual. I believe this is one of the possible paths for a certain kind of abstract painting, one of the responses to the study of the invisible..
Sabrina Casadei, “Outro”, 2024, mixed media on canvas, 210 x 230 cm, courtesy of the artist
In a context where much of contemporary painting – particularly among younger generations – seems oriented toward explicit figuration, your research privileges suspended and unresolved images. Can this choice be read as a critical reflection on the speed with which images are produced, consumed and interpreted today?
The art world, depending on market trends, can cyclically bring out one aspect more than another in its cauldron. In our time, we are bombarded by images that appear and vanish quickly, so they must possess qualities of immediacy and decipherability to be in any way effective. My position in relation to this reality is diametrically opposed, embracing the undefined, the elusive, the shapeless, the indeterminate, as different possibilities for dialogue and communication.
Sabrina Casadei, “Pariglie di onde”, 2025, mixed media on canvas, 50 x 40 cm, ph. Sebastiano Luciano; Sabrina Casadei’s studio in the countryside of Rome (detail), 2025, courtesy of the artist
Your artistic practice stands out for its ambitious approach, both in terms of execution and the breadth of theoretical research that underpins it. What are the main trajectories of your artistic research at the moment? Do you have any projects planned that will contribute to a redefinition of your pictorial language or to an evolution of your practice?
I’m deeply drawn to visual practices that explore the perception of landscape – for instance, the group experience that Etel Adnan recounts in her book Journey to Mount Tamalpais. In a state between ecstasy and consciousness, speaking again of beauty and aesthetics as threads that connect our eyes to the movement of leaves in the wind, of the light that filters through, that casts shadow, that receives the earth, that borders water, that embraces the sky. These are my attempts to capture and interpret the moment in its totality: «Saturate every atom. Eliminate all waste, all that is inert, superfluous: represent the moment in its entirety, with everything it includes… It must include the absurd, reality, the most petty things: but all made transparent» (Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary). In my practice, change takes shape slowly and kaleidoscopically. Painting moves in millimetric shifts, nourished by everything that crosses the gaze.
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Micol Di Veroli (Rome, 1976) is an art historian, critic and independent curator. She is a member of AICA – International Association of Art Critics. Since 2010 she has been curator of Glocal Project Consulting and collaborates with several international museums creating projects aimed at promoting and supporting Italian art abroad.
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