Marco Gastini

1938, Turin – 2018, Turin, Italy

Marco Gastini was one of the most intense and original artists of Italian art in the second half of the twentieth century. Born and based in Turin, he pursued a deeply personal body of work in which matter, gesture, and colour become vehicles of emotional and spiritual tension. From the 1960s onward, he combined conceptual rigour with expressive force, experimenting with materials such as stone, lead, glass, and pure pigments, pushing beyond the limits of traditional painting.
His work does not represent, it evokes. Each piece is a field of energy that vibrates in space and redefines it. The intensity of his research deeply struck Stefano Rastrelli, who built with Gastini a relationship that was not only that of collector and artist but a human and intellectual one, promoting his work with great dedication.

Del Respiro Sospeso is a monumental, airy composition, a fragment of silence exploded into space. Rectangles of canvas painted with earth tones, oxides, and intense blues overlap and drift apart like tectonic plates, held together by a structure that is light yet vibrant. Iron branches interweave like nerve fibres, energetic pathways that hold a balance suspended between density and lightness.
The work is a suspension both real and metaphorical: between matter and spirit, between gesture and contemplation. Marco Gastini does not construct a vision but a condition: that of waiting, of the emotional tension that precedes words, of a held breath that expands time and space. Every element is alive, taut, engaged. It is an installation to be looked at, but above all to be listened to inwardly.
This work carries the artist's entire poetic vocabulary: the dialogue between painting and sculpture, the drive to transform energy into form, the intimacy between matter and thought. It is a profound synthesis of what made Gastini an essential figure in our contemporary art.