TIME, IDENTITY, AND THE SYSTEMS WE INHABIT:

PAINTED REFLECTIONS OF ANGELO ASRAO'S WORLD

Angelo Asaro is an Italian painter based in London, whose artistic journey has taken a distinctly interdisciplinary route, from engineering to fine art, from oil-drenched figures battling entropy to video game allegories rendered in quiet rage. Angelo Asaro’s painting speaks to a condition both personal and historical: how to make meaning amid dissonance. 

Born and raised in Sicily, a region rich in myth, contradiction, and historical residue, Asaro’s early sensibility was shaped by the drama of Mediterranean light and the existential questions posed by writers such as Pirandello and Sciascia. His relocation to London added a cosmopolitan awareness to his practice, allowing personal narrative to intersect with broader social critique.

Across his major series, from Human Dissonance to Time and Existence and Pixels of Reflections, Asaro constructs psychological theatres, where fragile bodies, symbolic objects, and imagined structures stand in for the fractures of contemporary life. At once precise and poetic, his canvases resist both expressive chaos and conceptual didacticism, opting instead for a language of visual restraint and allegorical charge.

Pixels of Reflections: Game Worlds, Real Questions

In the series Pixels of Reflections, Angelo Asaro reframes classic video games as allegorical platforms to explore human behaviour, power, and division. These paintings merge nostalgic visuals with biting social commentary, layering familiar pixelated imagery with unexpected emotional and political gravity.

In Apartetris – Only Integration Fills the Gaps (2024), Asaro reimagines the game Tetris as a metaphor for social fragmentation and forced assimilation. Multicoloured blocks pile up unevenly below wireframe silhouettes, separated by vertical lines that resemble both game columns and prison bars. Fitting pieces together to eliminate gaps becomes a fraught allegory for immigration, social division, and the rigidity of ideological walls.

Apartetris – Only Integration Fills the Gaps

2024, Oil on Canvas, 50 x 50cm  

Showcased at Fables, Swanfall Art Annual Exhibition, Froggerism – Only Without Barriers We Win (2024) takes the game Frogger, where players guide a frog across roads and rivers, and reinterprets it through the lens of migration. “No” signs, segregated slogans like “GO BACK TO YOUR POND,” and reactionary billboards clutter the frog’s path, transforming an innocent game into a sharp critique of nationalism and border politics. The player’s journey becomes a metaphor for survival within a hostile system, one in which mobility itself is political.

Froggerism – Only Without Barriers We Win

2024, Oil on Canvas, 76 x 61.5cm  

In these works, Asaro doesn’t merely mimic the aesthetics of gaming culture. Instead, he restores ethical complexity to its flattened symbols. Beneath their vivid colours and clean lines, every-pixel-counts barrier seems to ask: Who gets to cross?

Human Dissonance: The Pressure of Appearances

In the series Human Dissonance, Asaro explores the fragmentation of the contemporary self, fractured by media, consumerism, and social judgment. In Silent War (2025), which won the First Prize Winner in the Giotto International Visual Arts Award 2025, Asaro denounces societal indifference to suffering. A faceless figure holds a burger in one hand and a television remote in the other, watching the news reporting on a war. The backdrop suggests catastrophe, but the scene appears curiously satirical, almost embalmed in apathy. The painting is not moralistic; instead, it stages a contradiction: grief and stillness, compassion and impotence.

Silent War, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 60 x 50cm 

The Appearance of Emptiness (2025), shown at the London Art Biennale, presents a surreal, grid-like world of conformity. A man faces a lineup of headless figures with shirts, suits, and jeans hanging on coat hangers instead of bodies. Individuality is stripped down to surface, style, and silhouette. Above them, a fire exit dangles on a string, guarded by a giant spider, which implies an escape, but at a cost.

The Appearance of Emptiness, 2025

Oil on Canvas, 61.5 x 76cm 

The lone green balloon floats beside the central figure, the only sign of levity in a scene dominated by control and surveillance. Asaro’s composition is tight, deliberate, and symbolic. He reduces alienation to its most legible signs: uniforms, barriers, impossible exits. The result is quietly unsettling, familiar yet estranged.

Time and Existence: The Poetics of the Ephemeral

In the series Time and Existence, Asaro turns his attention to temporality and the fleeting nature of experience, reflecting the desires to hold onto time, preserve memory, and question what is gained or lost in the process. 

In The Eternity of Moments (2024), a grey-haired man climbs a wooden ladder inside a giant hourglass, balancing stacks of photo albums that appear to be mid-fall. Below, a beagle sits quietly on the sand, a photograph held in its mouth, while scattered slides and prints litter the ground. The hourglass rests on a book titled The Old Man and the Sea, suggesting a reflection on endurance and memory. The image is tender but futile as an effort to archive moments as time slips away.

 The Eternity of Moments, 2024

Oil on Canvas, 60 x 50cm 

The Transmutation of Time (2024) continues the motif of the hourglass. This time, the man is operating a grinder that converts sand into diamonds, while the dog watches nearby. The base of the hourglass sits atop a book labelled L’ARGENT  (“Money” in French), connecting time to wealth and production. The painting presents a clear visual metaphor: time, once soft and slipping, becomes something sharp and commodified.

The Transmutation of Time, 2024

Oil on Canvas, 60 x 50cm  

What sets Asaro’s work apart isn’t the novelty of his subjects - alienation, time, identity - but the restraint with which he treats them. His paintings resist spectacle. They look at systems not to master them, but to observe and reframe. In a culture of urgency, Asaro’s images move slowly. And in their silence, they speak.

Images: © Angelo Asaro, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: Biyao (Katie) Yu