Beauty canons of Giovanni Gastela Automatic translate

“What captivates me in photography is that it has nothing to do with reality; it is the suspension of a constant flow of time. From endless movement, life, to eternal stillness; it refers to reality in order to create a parallel. "

For over forty years, Giovanni Gastel has been creating his own world of fashion and photography. During this time, his photographs appeared on the covers and pages of major fashion magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Elle, Vanity Fair, Donna, Mondo Uomo, Glamor, Femme, Amica, Sette, and also became part of world museums and private collections.

Giovanni Gastel was born in Milan in 1955 and belongs to the ancient Italian family Visconti. Much of what most people come across in museums - the interiors of the palazzo and the best works of Italian art - has become a daily occurrence for him. His uncle, the famous Italian director Lukino Visconti was one of the first to introduce Giovanni to the world of art and, above all, cinema. The search for the profession began for Gastel with a theatrical scene, as a teenager he participated in performances, and a little later became interested in literature and poetry. For a long time, Giovanni was sure that he would associate himself with literature, and did not leave interest and experiments with the poetic word even after he made a choice in favor of photography.

His first photographic experiments occurred in the 1970s. At this time, photography receives final recognition, gradually occupying an equal place in world museums and galleries. But fashion photography basically remains outside the institutions of art, considered an applied genre. For Gastel, these years were a period of apprenticeship and tests of different directions, he shot portraits, still lifes, weddings, and children became models for his first fashion shoots. In 1975, he got the opportunity to work for the Christies auction house, which taught him patience and a reverent attitude towards the object.

The turning point in the profession comes for the photographer in 1981, when he meets Carl Guilleri, who becomes his agent and introduces him into the world of fashion. After the first still lifes appeared in Annabella magazine, Gastel began collaborating with Vogue Italia, and then, thanks to a meeting with Flavio Luccini, with Mondo Uomo and Donna. So the editors of the largest fashion magazines notice him and soon Gastel’s photos go beyond Italy, spreading first in Paris, and then around the world. From that moment, he works with leading designers, including Nicolas Trussardi, Giovanni Versace and Maria Mandelli, known under the pseudonym Krizia. Then he joined the “Made in Italy” movement, whose participants were designers, editors and photographers. Focusing on European art history, they sought to create something authentic, contrasting themselves, first of all, with American traditions.

In today’s fast-paced modern world, fashion photography is soon gaining the status of art along with other photographic genres. Works originally created in completely different contexts are part of the emerging photographic canon and occupy a worthy place on the walls of museums and galleries. The final recognition of Giovanni Gastela takes place in 1997, when his first big retrospective is held in Milan, curated by an influential Italian art critic, Germano Cellant.

Giovanni Gastel does not believe in an absolute “synthesis of arts”, but at the same time he metaphorically describes the process of creating a photographic frame in theatrical and literary terms, noting the importance of “building a scene” and the need to “tell a story” in the image. He also points out the similarity between poetry and photography, which lies not so much in the lyricism of the works as in the very laconic structure of forms. Poetic and photographic works are like dreams, they hide a lot of meanings, and sometimes the text appears as if by itself, without the participation of the author, like a photographic picture that appears on the surface of the paper when developing. One of the embodiments of such a surreal understanding of the work is the Metamorphoses series, which refers to the texts of Franz Kafka. In other series you can find visual references to the works of photographers close to surrealism: Irwin Penn, Erwin Blumenfeld, Guy Bourdin.

Gastel is aware of the illusory and ephemeral nature of fashion photography, using the techniques of various directions, from the Renaissance to pop art, to create an illusion. He easily handles the established canons, inviting the viewer to see how different our ideas about beauty and how it should be represented in the image can be. Individual shots and methods of his work - close-ups and subtle silhouettes - appeal to the cinematic experience of the viewer. In the series “Ritratti di Living”, commissioned by Elle Decor in 2013, Gastel reproduces the works of Edward Hopper, making the viewer doubt for the first time what he sees, a painting or a frame of the film.

The photographer uses a variety of equipment, from large-scale analog cameras to modern digital ones. One of its recognizable types of print is a large-format polaroid image, with its characteristic size (20x25 cm) and shades of colors. Unlike many contemporaries, Gastel considers the invention of digital technology to be the real birth of photography, which until then was "just archeology." At the same time, the author uses a variety of analog photography techniques: image overlay, pictorial processing methods, separation into fragments and layers, and when working with a digital image, he pays close attention to subsequent processing.

Gastel speaks of the attitude to the world and photography in the words of Pascal: “What we all strive for with all our might is to understand the meaning of life, tomorrow. But what we really have to think about is tapestry. We are all as if inside a tapestry, lost in a meaningless interweaving of knots. Only being on the other side, after death, we can move away and see the image. And even if one knot is missing, the tapestry remains unfinished. "

March 16 at 18:00 will be an author’s excursion with Giovanni Gastel. The cost is 600 rubles, the number of seats is limited.

The exhibition runs until May 9th.