“The large paintings of Turin-born Marco Gastini, often as big as a whole wall, are dominated by emotion, by tension and by energy. They enclose something pulsating, as if the different elements and signs by which the pictures themselves are kept together showed to the observer aspects quite different from one another: at times bare and crude matter, at other times a chromatic, pictorial, and artistic element The energy contained in these works floats in front of the works themselves and behind them, within them and outside them, so that the visual plane seems to waver between the indescribable and the intangible”. (H. Friedel)
After 15 years away from Milan Marco Gastini returns with a one-man show at Lorenzelli Arte. The opening is on September 26th , at 6,30 p.m.. The show at Lorenzelli will include early work that goes from 1969 till the mid 1970's and very recent pieces produced ad hoc for this exposition (2000-2001). In the three spaces of the gallery the public will be able to view Gastini's rich and magnificent digression which include pieces such as: La mano aperta della pittura, 2000-2001, mixed media on canvas with the use of iron, chalk, slate, cm. 372x540x150, which has already been exhibited at GAM and at Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, both exhibitions were in 2001; Rimbalzo tra gli echi del blu, 1996, mixed media on canvas with the use of iron and chalk, cm. 200x48; Nel volo attorno, dated 2001-2002, cm. 222x307x160, the recent, Del respiro sospeso, 2002, and his latest piece, Ruotante, 2002, mixed media on canvas, with the use of iron and chalk, cm. 130x284x4.
The artist will be present at the opening and there will be a color catalog with texts by Marco Gastini and Helmut Frieldel (Lorenzelli Arte # 99, Italian/English, 68 pages with 30 color illustrations).
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES. Marco Gastini was born in 1938 in Turin, the city where he now lives and works.
After completing his studies in art at the accademia Albertina, he began his personal experience by moving from the need to overcome the stagnation of late non-representational painting and to arrive, at first, at the definition of a form of painting marked by elementary traces and gestures approaching the fields cultivated by contemporary "analytical painting", and then, towards the mid seventies, at a vision no longer classifiable in the codified tendencies of the moment. It was painting that aimed at conferring body and image on a continually renewed spatiality charged with tension and nourished by the generative strength of various materials (glass, plexiglas, wood, lead, iron, stone, etc.) which from time to time Gastini puts in his work, leading them into a dialogue with colour.
