Marco Gastini (Turin 1938)

Marco Gastini was born in Turin in 1938. He began his career in 1958 and, after obtaining his diploma from Turin’s Accademia di Belle Arti, he held his first personal show in 1964. Then, in 1968, he came to abstract art, bypassing the experience of Informal art and material painting,  which we sensed had had its day. His first mature works began to arrive, with a predilection for white, the rarefied, the transparent. The free gesture which still accompanies the spots of lead and antimony on the walls or on a sheet of plexiglass has subsided in Disegno (1971), a simple tracing of orthogonal lines and tiny marks written in charcoal and pastel crayon. But from that time on, along with this bareness, he was searching for an environmental vocation for his painting, which always emerges from the rectangle of the canvas and often from the wall, invading the space of the viewer.
He was a friend of many artists working in the field of analytical art (in the same way as he had been close to the early poveristi, in the fertile crucible that was Turin in the 1960s, but as early as then he harboured feelings of dissatisfaction with a quest that was too chaste and self-absorbed. At the start of the 1980s, by first keeping white as his predominant colour, then by siding it, above all, with blues and pinks, his paintings began once again to be crammed with a richer and unforeseen gestural expressiveness. This was the dawning of the season which has continued successfully until the present, in which Gastini has become a highly individual artist, who cannot be confused with any other, far from any ecclesia, manifesto, or programme. His canvases, free on the wall, are now charged with more and more unorthodox materials (parchment, carobs, tin, glass and stones) superimposed on the canvas and themselves covered with chromatic material, in an emotional crescendo which soon reaches a paroxysm, where everything is chance, risk, and trespass.
Gastini, who lives and works in Turin, is an artist with great international prestige - his important personal exhibitions and, from 1982, his retrospectives, have been mounted in many of the leading museums in Italy and in numerous public and private spaces in Europe and the United States.