Marco Gastini

As the title suggests, the protagonist of this work by Marco Gastini is energy, the central theme of his artistic career. In a conversation with art historian Bruno Corà, Gastini explained his work as the need to “touch the energy within the materials and make it become painting, to capture the tension and put it on the canvas”. His Light, L’energia che unisce si espande nel blu (The Energy that Unites Expands in Blue), is thus configured as a large luminous painting mainly in shades of blue, to which Gastini attributed a special energy, evoking “Klein or Giotto blue”.  

Marco Gastini (Turin, 1938-2018) trained at the Accademia Albertina in Turin and prior to that, at his father’s marble workshop. He started his research in the 1960s, driven by the need to move beyond the late Informal, initially arriving at the definition of a painting of minimal marks and gestures, which then expanded, fragmented, in tension with space. Among his works, the Concretizzazioni (Concretizations) are objects of different natures (stones, fruits, plaster casts) dialoguing with the chromatic substance of the painting, while the Macchie (Spots) created directly on the wall with lead and antimony allude to painting as a physical act, “the weight of a gesture that demands maximum concentration”. With an extensive exhibition activity in Italy and abroad, Gastini participated in the Venice Biennale on two occasions, in 1976 and 1982. In 2001, the GAM - Torino dedicated a major retrospective to him, curated by Pier Giovanni Castagnoli and Helmut Friedel, which was later staged at the Lenbachhaus in Munich. 

Recent solo exhibitions include: MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna, Bologna (2012) and Museo Pecci, Spazio Borgogno, Milan (2014).   

Silvia Maria Sara Cammarata