Fashion photographer and portraitist, who passed away at the age of 65, he was the interpreter of the phase that saw Italy as the protagonist of a global aesthetic movement
by Angelo Flaccavento
Fashion photographer and portraitist, who passed away at the age of 65, he was the interpreter of the phase that saw Italy as the protagonist of a global aesthetic movement
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There was a moment in which the Italian gaze defined a global aesthetic movement: fashion and design at the center, it was conveyed by magazines with an unmistakable language. The name of Giovanni Gastel, fashion photographer and portrait painter who passed away at the age of sixty-five, will be forever linked to that pioneering, pressing, magmatic phase.
The photographic sense of style
Her visual code was the very essence of Donna and Mondo Uomo, the magazines founded by Gisella Borioli and Flavio Lucchini, fugitives of more institutional periodicals and publishers, who were the spearhead of new wave Milanese, very new in embracing every field of knowledge linked to style and in treating it with a clear, exact point of view, not least in a photographic sense. As if to say: little exoticism, focus on silhouette and design, fashion as an expression of a wider design culture.
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Gastel summarized everything in photographs of studied naturalness and elegance, recognizable but free from that limiting idea of style as a formula to be repeated ad nauseam that seems to have imposed itself lately, and that takes away from the true style its evolutionary vitality. Today he uses differently, but Gastel, related to Luchino Visconti on his mother’s side and deeply marked by his esthete uncle, never made exhibitions of the noble births for career purposes, to create aura around his person. Still less did he take refuge in textbook decadence and decadence.
Contemporary and antinostalgic
Instead, he made a lot of apprenticeship, and found himself a modernist with a classic spirit, as only an Italian can be. He invented a style in which intelligence and culture come together in a contemporary and antinostalgic sign. Yet in that way of conceiving the fashion photo as a portrait, using light to draw the character by highlighting the shape of the dress, one could read centuries of painting, without the slightest intention of quoting. Even a mythical service for World Man, with faces composed of shells and other objects a façon of Arcimboldo, appears more like a joke of the moment than an easy neo-mannerism.
Visual fashions then inevitably surpassed him, but Gastel, who finally gave himself to portraits tout court for his undoubted introspective abilities, remains for future memory the ability to do more, with less: a neutral backdrop and light were enough to create atmosphere and magic. His gaze was nourished by a lot but as befits adults, it was expressed by synthesis.