Massa Roland

Roland Massa is a Belgian artist born in Sint-Niklaas in 1943. He is a draftsman and graphic artist. He was educated at the Academy in Sint-Niklaas and at Sint-Lucas in Ghent. He was awarded the Prize for Graphic Art by the province of East Flanders in 1967. In 1968 he became a teacher at the Academy in Sint-Niklaas. His main sources of inspiration are the cosmic nature and the female nude. From the press: 'Cosmic is not an empty concept when one empathizes with this breathing, organically growing space, in which an endless microscopic life moves that is at once permeated with a brooding yet grand silence. Both the flowing and round and the more pointed forms all have something vegetal or organic about them and at the same time they are included in a dense atmosphere of light-dark shades' and 'Until recently, the typical Massa drawing usually showed a rather busy figuration: three, four or sometimes more equivalent figures, or in other cases a juxtaposition of related scenes. In the most recent scenes, however, a certain shift is noticeable. It seems that the once predominant motif of the human figure (the nude) is losing importance in itself, precisely in favor of design, the thing-world. As in a cinematic close-up, a certain prop is drawn in the foreground, while the human figure emerges rather blurry, vaguely from the background or disappears into it.' (P. Huys, 1984) Roland Massa is mentioned in BAS II and Twee centuries of signatures of Belgian artists. (Piron)