The end of the Forties and the beginning of the Fifties are fundamental in the artistic career of Sassu for the discovery of ceramics. During those years Sassu was in Albissola, encouraged by Tullio Mazzotti, and there he was working side by side with the main artists of the time. It was not only a cultural exchange, but a life together that made them meet the most various people and move in the main social circles.
That is how he produces many portraits of not identified people, and we do not even know if they were acquaintances or just people he had seen in these places. Portraits that are often drawings, or that, as in the case of Ritratto di donna of the 1950s, are developed on canvas. It still keeps the prerogative of the note, as on the left side of this oil on canvas, in which the artist sketches the face of a man.
La graziosa Gabriella is painted in a very different time and place, in the Milan of the Nineties, but it presents the same characteristics of a non specifically contextualised portrait, with a fast kind of painting as if it was a sketch or, as mentioned above, a note, this time made on cardboard but still with oil. Even though we do not see it from the painting, the woman is an actress that Sassu had seen in a show at Teatro Nazionale in Piazza Piemonte, and who recurs in many paintings of these years.
A very different type of portrait is that of Laura Pomini, the winner of the contest "The model for the arts" in 1985, an event by Regione Piemonte in Acqui Terme. As opposed to the paintings analysed above, this is a nude, which the artist loved to paint especially in mythological works and in Maison Tellier.