MARCO GASTINI		Biography
quindici opere di Marco Gastini 1969/1978, un decennio		Catalog
curated by ANDREA ALIBRANDI
16 september – 4 november 2016

To begin the new 2016/2017 exhibition season Galleria Il Ponte is presenting an important group of works by Marco Gastini, made between 1969 and 1978. A fundamental decade within the long career of an artist whose personal research path followed the lines of 1970s analytical painting, also known as ‘painting-painting’, of which he is undisputedly a leading exponent.
His ‘figures’ are reduced to dots and lines, constants in his mode of painting, in which “attention detaches the gesture, action distances the undifferentiated gaze, space opposes another space, in turn interrupted…”. His meagre, sensitive signs seem to follow the gesture as it settles, the traces of a thought pondered but not expressed. “Tracing those dots for me is like thinking of a space, ‘seeing’ a space”…
Among the works on show some are made of Plexiglas, a medium that Gastini likes to use owing to its transparency, presented at a distance from the wall, which first the stains (1969) and the scratches (1972) seem to “float” on, while the Durcot creates a tactile surface defining Gastini’s signs (1973-74); one of the big white canvases from 1973 seems to oscillate with the dots of a new space; some large Japanese papers from 1974, where large white backgrounds are the site for etchings and signs, up to the two large works on paper from 1977/78, in which the sign and composition gain structure and energy, anticipating the use of matter in the 1980s.