Farewell to Giovanni Gastel, the photographer of the "Portraits of the soul". He was born in Milan on 27 December 1955 to Giuseppe Gastel and Ida Visconti di Modrone and was the youngest of seven children. He was the nephew of Luchino Visconti. He began his career as a photographer in the late 70s, but his true professional career began in the years 75/76 with the Christie's auction house. Some years later she meets Carla Ghisleri and enters the world of fashion and her pictures start to be published in famous magazines such as Vogue Italia. From here in the 90s a zillion of advertising campaigns for well-known Italian stylists of Made in Italy of the period, such as: Versace, Missoni, Krizia and many others. Then in Paris, with his refined taste, he also found success with French maisons such as Dior. The experience in fashion allows him to express the best that there is in him as a "poet" of the image, photographing people and celebrities with a particularly unique style, trying to immortalize in the portrait the heart or soul hidden from the common gaze . He loved to talk for hours with the person to be photographed and from there his magic was transformed into a profound and almost immaterial shot. To remember his personal exhibition held in 1997 at the Milan Triennale, curated by Germano Celant, which definitively celebrates him among the sacred monsters of Italian photography.
Finally, last year, his latest – truly exclusive – exhibition at the Maxxi Museum in Rome with a selection of 200 portraits which portray faces of people from the world of culture, design, art, fashion, music, entertainment and politics. Portraits on display that follow one after the other as if to tell the life, rather than the profession of Gastel, which we see today in a tribute to his great life story.
Dwelling on his latest works, the series "The fallen angels” 22 works that move invisible in the Berlin sky. Angels who live in woods and move with extraordinary elegance within a suffused opacity and fall gracefully to earth. “I began looking for other fallen angels,” she says, “and found some who were desperate to regain heaven, others who had accepted earthly living and sat in bars with their remoteness hidden, still others who transformed their celestial radiance in dark shadow". John Gastel
And finally the series "Nymphs”, who whirl around like ethereal maidens, queens and protectors of woods, suspended between dream and reality, which seem to gracefully dance around a fantasy world, in perfect harmony with a great respect for nature as Gastel wished.
Immovable/ the divine beauty remains/ in front of our ecstatic admiration/ almost imploring us to believe in her/ and not in the miseries of the world... restored to a kind of freshness of thought/we forcefully enter the sphere of dreams”. (Texts by Giovanni Gastel – Taken from the book "Talking about beauty” Fragments for a restless conversation – Edizioni Lamberto Fabbri).
The whole world of Gastel will never be pure image but beauty immortalized by a thought that will remain imprinted in that deafening noise of the soul that his works transmit.
