Still open until March 15, 2014, the Gallery of the Cembalo in Rome (largo della Fontanella di Borghese, 19) hosts the exhibition Double play. Photographs by Giovanni Gastel and Toni Thorimbert, edited by Giovanna Calvenzi.
Inside the space dedicated to photography, inaugurated in 2013 on the initiative of Paola Stacchini Cavazza and Mario Peliti at Palazzo Borghese, in the center of Rome, the exhibition presents 52 works by two important interpreters of contemporary Italian photography.
Opened in conjunction with the Roman haute couture events, the review offers a dialogue made up of references and references between the experiences of two authors who have been able to cross the language of fashion with suggestions and personal research in other areas of photography.
Gastel and Thorimbert they certainly represent two different personalities, for lived experiences and for vision of photography, united however by rigor, passion, mutual respect, friendship, belonging generation.
The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Peliti Associati
So he writes Giovanna calvenzi in the introductory text to the exhibition:
“Double game”, an adjective and a noun. Analyzed separately they have precise meanings, together the analysis becomes less certain, almost ambiguous. It alludes, in the first instance, to a possible intentional deception or, in a broader sense, to a game played by two.
Both solutions apply perfectly to what Giovanni Gastel and Toni Thorimbert did in creating the visual proposal for this exhibition. They played together, from afar, reflecting on each other's archives and photographic experiences practiced and cultivated over time.
Secretly they really played a double game when they used the territories of fashion for creative exercises that had their matrix in other fields. They have explicitly borrowed, mixed, languages and grammars, they have improperly and inappropriately declined the syntax of genres. They used references, contaminations, irony, winks.
They have often kept to the margins of what is permitted, contaminating the possible with the impossible, good with bad taste, classicism with baroque. In an exercise that foresees that margins are not extreme limits but starting points, the beginning of a new creative process, they wanted and knew how to transform work into play. In a double, shared game.
Biographical notes
John Gastel was born in Milan on December 27, 1955, from Giuseppe Gastel and Ida Visconti di Modrone, the last of seven children.
His first contact with photography took place in the 1975s. From that moment, he begins a long period of apprenticeship, while an important opportunity is offered to him in 76-XNUMX, when he starts working for the Christie's auction house.
The turning point came in 1981 when he met Carla Ghiglieri, who became his agent and brought him closer to the world of fashion. After the appearance of his first still-lifes in Annabella magazine, in 1982, he began to collaborate with Vogue Italia and then, thanks to the meeting with Flavio Lucchini, director of Edimoda, and with Gisella Borioli, with the magazines Mondo Uomo and Donna.
His active commitment in the world of photography also brought him closer to the Association of Professional Italian Photographers, of which he was president from 1996 to 1998. The artistic consecration took place in 1997, when the Milan Triennale dedicated a personal exhibition to him, curated by the historian of contemporary art Germano Celant.
Professional success consolidates in the following decade, so much so that his name appears in specialized magazines together with that of Italian photographers such as Oliviero Toscani, Gian Paolo Barbieri, Ferdinando Scianna, or alongside those of Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Mario Testino and Juergen Teller.
In 2002, as part of the La Kore Oscar della Moda event, he received the Oscar for Photography. He is currently president of the Associazione Fotografi Italiani Professionisti and permanent member of the Polaroid Museum of Chicago.
Toni Thorimbert (Lausanne, 1957) began taking photographs at a very young age, documenting the social and political tensions of the XNUMXs.
In the XNUMXs, his close collaboration with periodicals such as Max, Sette and Amica was fundamental in defining the new visual standard of the time.
Reporter, portraitist, fashion photographer, capable of continually reinventing his relationship with photography and often ahead of times and trends, he is a lecturer in various workshops on the language of photography and was the critical curator of the exhibition Images from the internal world, a collective on the theme of feelings and human relationships in which eleven European photographers have used photography as an active part in the process of self-analysis and self-awareness. The exhibition was one of the events of the Rencontres Internationales de Photographie D'Arles 1998.
In 2000, Baldini&Castoldi published the volume Transfert on the same themes, an anthology dedicated to the artist's most personal work. Since then he has collaborated with international magazines such as Details, Mademoiselle, Wallpaper, and Italian ones, from GQ to Rolling Stone, Sportweek, Io Donna, Style, as well as the creation of prestigious advertising campaigns. In 2006 Nepente Editore published Carta Stampata, a prestigious volume that brings together thirty years of fashion and portrait photography, while in 2012, Tabularasa was released, a book on the life of Vasco Rossi made with Efrem Raimondi, published by Mondadori.
His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Photographs of her have been acquired by the Photographic Collection of the City of Paris and various other museums and institutions in Italy and elsewhere.
Rome, January 2014
DOUBLE PLAY. Photographs by Giovanni Gastel and Toni Thorimbert
Rome, the harpsichord gallery
Largo di Fontanella Borghese, 19
January 24 - March 15, 2014
business hours
Tuesday – Friday: from 16.00 to 19.30 (morning by appointment)
Saturday: from 10.30 to 13.00 and from 16.00 to 19.30
