GIRONA, 1962 Toni Cassany

He is a powerful painting, of sumptuous simplicity, crystallized through an essential treatment of light.

BIOGRAPHY

Toni Cassany began painting professionally in 1998. From a very young age he had learned the trade from the hands of great masters. The school where he studied had good professionals: Perpiñán, Fita, Julià Cutiller, Villa. As a child I was already participating in drawing and painting competitions where I used to go and I often won them.

However, he did not decide on this profession and studied Spanish Philology at the Universities of Granada and Santiago de Compostela. The knowledge of the art of the word always helped him to understand the art of color and shapes. After these studies he returned to plastic art. From the hands of the Girona-born painter María Rosa Ferrer, Toni Cassany picked up the brushes again. After a first year of intense work (1989) the first solo exhibition will be held (January 1990) where he showed the best of his production: watercolors, ink drawings and oils. The oils attracted a lot of attention to the public what made them decide for this technique although they have never abandoned the others. The painter Lluís Roura attended this exhibition. The Empordà teacher congratulated him and encouraged her to paint day after day, without rest. When Toni called him to thank him for it, in Roura he invited him to his studio. This encounter changed his artistic life because that evening he received the best painting lesson he could ever have asked for. They were the best used minutes of my entire artistic career, in the words of the artist. Never again would forget that lesson so simple and yet so important. Years later, on the occasion of the inaguration of his exhibition number twenty, Toni had some words of remembrance of that lesson and declared himself a pupil of the Empordà teacher.

Since then he has been exhibiting continuously. The years of consolidation of the trade arrived. Years where, in addition, she practiced new artistic facets that enriched her as an artist: graphic design, illustration of books and various publications. Fruit of this last stage have been two illustrated books with his work: Pueblos del Baix Empordà (1998) and Press cuttings for the sunset (2006).

He has never left the exhibitions. At present it has more than twenty individual and innumerable exhibitions of co-lectures. We find his work in private collections throughout Spain and several countries in Europe and America.

TONI CASSANY

by David Pagès i Cassú

Toni Cassany sees painting as a way of communicating the inner world. From the landscape, he looks for the sensation it conveys. He does not want to limit himself to showing reality as it is, but to take the emotion he wants to transmit. Behind this objective, well achieved, there are many hours of work, enthusiasm and perseverance.

The landscapes of the Empordà are the protagonists of most of his paintings. He got to know them many years ago, when, due to professional circumstances, he travelled to the region every day. Many places attracted him greatly: the marshes, the bay of Roses, the houses of Cadaqués, the Montgrí massif, Llafranc… and Calella de Palafrugell. Also the plains and the mountains, the crops and the harvests, the colours and the lights, the air and the smells… and, of course, the untamed and regenerating Tramontana.

The style of Toni Cassany’s work is very clearly defined in one specific and precise aspect: the treatment of light. The impact of colour can be very spectacular, but he does not so much seek the visual spectacle as the emotion conveyed. And that emotion increases when the contrast between shadows and light is achieved. In this matter he also wanted to find his territory and his pictorial personality. At the same time, he also aims to reach a more realistic, concrete and precise resolution of the foreground. This is where he takes the greatest risks and where he achieves the best of his technique.

He is very comfortable in the composition, in the distribution of volumes. He exceeds in it, which allows him to make the gaze of the viewer, who is looking at his paintings, go where he intends it to go. He often makes it wander towards infinity, walking accompanied by the shape of clouds, fields, trees… until it gets lost in an imprecise point, where heaven and earth meet. Depth, never better said, is this. Cassany searches for the infinite, in painting and in the soul.

THE EXPLANOUS LANDSCAPES OF TONI CASSANY

by Josep M. Cadena

The Girona painter Toni Cassany celebrates thirty years of public presence as an artist and wants us to share with him, in the Rusiñol Gallery of Sant Cugat, the satisfaction he has always found in representing the landscape as a reason for human introspection. Realistic as it is, his inspiration comes from the constant changes of nature, which serve him first to describe what he sees, but which are basically opportunities to try to understand how we are the people who act in this scenario of forms and colors. His is a very intense painting that encompasses, with an overwhelming amplitude, the widely varied geography of our land and helps us to feel ourselves members of the same human community.

The sea and the mountains, the greens and reds of the soils that germinate or are prepared to do it, the fields of wheat that the wind blows, the olive trees that are milestones of a path of progress, the vast skies that with their clarity establish sensations of spirituality, the dark hours that impose rectification reflections in relation to the mistakes made, the sunflowers and poppies, the almond trees in bloom, the villages with the elevated tower of the church as a guiding beacon, the cypress trees at a side of the road that warn us that everything is over … Behold, manifested in words that necessarily fall short of the ways of saying that Toni Cassany offers us, a sample of the painter’s very outstanding palette.

His paintings exhibit nature in full bloom, with greens that are a song to life that is continually renewed, whites that convey purity and delicacy, golds that are synonymous with wealth, blues that express yearnings for elevation and reds that refer to the struggle often violent not to succumb, but we also detect human presence, which is presented to us well integrated, as befits an intelligent coexistence to which we must tend.

In these thirty years of painting that he now celebrates, Toni Cassany succeeded in building his own artistic personality, taking advantage of his passion for the essence of the landscape, which he has channeled into a post-impressionism with natural roots that has led to a refined and highly sensitive diction . Deeply sincere, it has an adjusted efficiency that, while informing, moves.