Born in 1921 in a small village in southern Italy, Peter Marcasiano emigrated with his family to the United States as a child and grew up in New Jersey. It was during his military service in Alaska that he decided to become an artist. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and later at the Art Students League in New York. In the early 1950s, he moved to Europe. In Florence, he discovered Masaccio, whose work would have a lasting influence on his own. He then settled in Paris and, in 1951, briefly joined the studio of Fernand Léger. But it was in 1959 that Galerie Welz in Salzburg devoted his first solo exhibition to him, accompanied by a catalogue. It would be the only exhibition of his lifetime. In 1968, he settled permanently in Paris, in the 18th arrondissement, on boulevard Barbès, with his partner Denise Blanchet. Their daughter, Colombe, was born in 1974. It was in this apartment, painting in the living room or the kitchen transformed into a studio, that he developed a quiet, rigorous, and daily practice. Marcasiano devoted himself almost exclusively to what might be called small format still lifes, on unstretched canvas or paper: onions, fish, flowers, grapes, pomegranates… A series of recurring motifs that he approached with a muted palette, often desaturated, applied in thin, almost translucent layers. He painted alone, often at night, in a silence that felt inhabited. His paintings, both frontal and suspended, convey an almost metaphysical presence, shaped by repetition and careful attention to the simplest subjects. His work unfolded over time, with successive layers, additions, and revisions. Peter Marcasiano died in 1984.
Today, his work — carefully preserved by his family — is undergoing a slow and steady rediscovery. Recent presentations have helped bring visibility to a body of work that had remained largely confidential, and have highlighted both its formal singularity and its sustained relationship to painting as a practice of persistence. In 2010, one of his canvases was shown at the Centre Pompidou as part of the exhibition “Les promesses du passé”. In 2018, his daughter Colombe organised a tribute exhibition entitled “Family Affair” in the apartment where she grew up and where her father painted. In 2021, a selection of paintings by Peter Marcasiano left the original apartment for the first time and were presented at Double Séjour in a duo show curated by Joël Riff. In 2022, Galerie Valentin dedicated the first posthumous solo exhibition to his work: “Natures mortes”. 2025 marks a new step in the rediscovery of his practice, with the publication of a catalogue and a group exhibition at DS Galerie, bringing his work into dialogue with that of a dozen contemporary artists.
In October 2026, Fondazione Giuliani in Rome will present his first exhibition in Italy alongside artist Michele Tocca, ahead of his solo exhibition at DS Galerie in 2027, “My Own White Forms”.