YOU NEED ART!

Research-Based Artistic Practice

Raso’s identity as a research artist means his work is process-driven and inquiry-led. He approaches art-making as a form of investigation, combining empirical observation with symbolic and transpersonal exploration. His research spans forgotten traditions, symbolic infrastructures, and the subtle fields generated by alignment and coherence.

This methodology involves reactivating cultural memories and adapting them within contemporary frameworks, not as nostalgic preservation but as living systems open to reinterpretation and transformation. His work often functions as a form of structural interference—interrupting habitual perceptions and inviting deeper engagement with the symbolic layers beneath surface reality.

«Art has accompanied humans from cave walls to contemporary installations; its function is to carry meaning across time and between cultures. Practiced seriously, it mediates between individual experience and the shared human field. The artist’s task is not to impose themes but to respond to what addresses them, activating internal capacities—attention, imagination, discernment—and shaping encounters in which those capacities can reorganize a life. When this reorganization occurs, its effects are not merely personal; they propagate through relationships and institutions. Art can precipitate new questions, unsettle habits, and open emotional range, seeding durable shifts in society and culture.»

Joseph Beuys and the Artist as Mediator

Raso’s practice stands in clear dialogue with Joseph Beuys’s legacy: the artist as a mediator between material and symbolic realities, shaping meaning rather than merely commenting on it. Like Beuys, Raso treats art as an active, situated process—one that includes actions, relations, and contexts—and he draws pragmatically on shamanic and therapeutic lineages. Yet these affinities are carried forward through a research-driven discipline: practices are tested, refined, and integrated only insofar as they prove responsible and relevant to contemporary life.

Echoing Beuys’s pedagogical spirit, Raso’s programs function as living laboratories of “social sculpture,” emphasizing discernment, personal responsibility, and direct experience. Participants are not asked to imitate forms but to build a personal relationship with the creative and transpersonal process—often by unlearning inherited scripts that obstruct clarity. Where Raso diverges is in method and stance: he refuses doctrine and spectacle, preferring to cultivate conditions in which others access their own resources with precision and autonomy. The result is a parallel to Beuys that remains wholly independent—an artist-mediator who facilitates transformation without subsuming his vision to any lineage.

«My principal understanding of art is that the subject chooses the artist. My task is to answer and articulate—to trace the causes, situations, and encounters that present themselves, and make them available for contemplation and visibility. While my work is rooted in the personal, it is directed toward our shared human continuum: art as a bridge between individual experience and collective meaning. I draw on Joseph Beuys’s expanded concept of art insofar as it frames the artist as a mediator rather than a commentator. His explorations of shamanism, ritual, and healing remain valuable references, but I adopt them with a critical, research-driven independence—testing, refining, and integrating only what proves responsible and relevant today. The aim is not to transmit doctrine, but to create conditions in which others can access their own creative and transpersonal resources.»