Multimedia artist Paola Cassola began her career as a journalist and photojournalist, working for Vogue and other international magazines. Her numerous assignments took her on extensive travels, covering a wide range of universal topics, including beauty, gender identity, politics, sustainability, poverty, wealth, health, and culture. In 2004, a traumatic event severely limited her mobility, marking a turning point that led Cassola to explore new modes of expression. Since then, she has created numerous autobiographical works, placing the body, energy, and movement at the center of her artistic research.

Cassola’s practice continues to explore diverse forms of movement and technique, pushing the boundaries of the body. She moves fluidly across painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and video art, often integrating multiple media within a single work. Her recent Silhouette series combines her Energy Paintings with performative experiences, guiding subjects into meditative, dreamlike states, during which their presence is impressed onto canvas or paper by the artist. The result is an unconventional, deeply intimate portrait.

The rope, one of Cassola’s favored expressive tools, embodies both limitation and liberation. Beyond its use in Energy Paintings, the rope appears in her bronze Mirrors series, where it is sculpted to mimic a real rope, intertwined with ivy branches and leaves collected from forests — naturally clinging to their surroundings — symbolizing life and the bonds it forms, a promise of loyalty and fidelity. The body remains central to Cassola’s work, present both in the manual labor of creating these bronze mirrors and in the moment of reflection, when viewers see themselves mirrored.

Cassola was born in Milan and has lived and worked in London, Madrid, Geneva, Santiago de Chile, and Rio de Janeiro. She currently resides and works between Miami, USA, and Pietrasanta, Italy. Arte in Salotto presented a solo exhibition of her work in the fall of 2023.