A small and surprising anthology of carefully chosen works: this is an apt description of the solo show “Disegnare sul vuoto. I plexiglas di Marco Gastini”, curated by Marco Meneguzzo. From 19 October to 30 November the Progettoarte-Elm gallery in Milan will be exhibiting a wide range of the production which Gastini created on a transparent support. The show aims to look at Gastini’s special way of thinking about material, not simply as a genial analytical and conceptual artifice, but as a wider-ranging expressive tool, one that is also adapted to more emotive actions and to the making of more expressionist marks. As a result of this, the public will find itself in front of a selection of works from various periods of his career and will be able to re-contextualise, through a personal and coherent itinerary, what until now has been confined to a pigeonhole in the history of Italian art, and to frame this production – not a very large one, but significant and continuative – in the personal choices of the artist that go far beyond the analytical period of his activity. For Gastini, the use of Plexiglas as a surface on which to place his minimal marks began in the very early 1970s, but very few know that this type of support was also use by him in the successive decades. If, in fact, the idea of cancelling the support in favour of marks seems to be in line with the spirit of the 1970s, in the 1980s and 1990s, which were more inclined to painterly expressions of art, this attitude might seem distant from the other subjects and methods of that period: Gastini instead continued to follow this line of research, even in more innocent times, by accentuating in this way his “trademark” far beyond the analycity typical of the 1970s. As the curator Marco Meneguzzo has written, “In other words, this research seems not to be so much linked to a historical period in which a non-traditional support could be the justification for the act of painting, however much reduced to minimal terms – to dots, scratches, stains in the case of Gastini – but to the whole personal and individual activity of the artist, such much so as to be frequently used and exploited in the successive decades and in more fertile, articulated and even narrative pictorial contexts”. The show is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue (in Italian and English), published by Progrettoarte-Elm, containing a critical essay by the curator, reproductions of all the works on show, and with up-to-date biographical and bibliographical notes.

Inaugurazione :
18 ottobre 2018 ore 18:30
Catalogo in galleria

mpefm ITALY art press release