Marco Gastini, born in Turin in 1938, was an Italian artist whose work spanned several decades and encompassed a variety of materials and artistic expressions. His journey into the art world began early, influenced by his father, a marble-worker, where he acquired familiarity with techniques and processing materials. This early exposure laid the foundation for his lifelong exploration of space, materiality, and the boundaries of painting. Gastini's formal education in art commenced at the School of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts of Turin, where he graduated in 1960. That same year marked the beginning of his recognition in the art world when he won the Young Artists Award of the City of Turin with his painting "Breakfast on the beach." This early success was a harbinger of the innovative path Gastini would carve in the art world. In 1964, Gastini held his first solo exhibition, showcasing spray paintings that he further exhibited in 1968 at the Galleria Il Punto in Turin. His work during this period was characterized by a fascination with continuous vital flows above the neutral surface of the canvas, a theme that would recur throughout his career. The following year, he participated in the Salone dell'Annunciata in Milan with paintings on plexiglass, marking his early experimentation with non-traditional materials and forms. The 1970s brought a more radical turning point in Gastini's career. He began using materials that seemed to distance his work from traditional painting but in reality, signified a new way of understanding it. This period saw the first fusions of lead and antimony on walls, presented at the collective exhibition Arte e Critica '70, held at the Galleria Civica of Modena. His work during this time delved into the problematicness and close relationship of painting with both mental and physical space, becoming a constant theme in his language. Gastini's exploration of space and materiality was not confined to the canvas or traditional art spaces. In the mid-1970s, his vision evolved beyond the codified trends of the moment, leading to a form of painting marked by elementary traces and gestures approaching the fields cultivated by contemporary “analytical painting." This phase of his work aimed at conferring body and image on a continually renewed spatiality charged with tension and nourished by the generative strength of various materials such as glass, plexiglas, wood, lead, iron, stone, etc., where Gastini engaged in a dialogue with color. Throughout his career, Gastini remained adjacent to but apart from the reigning Arte Povera, Conceptualism, and Minimalism movements of his generation. He is perhaps best known for rendering his tentative brushstrokes on Plexiglas rather than on traditional canvas support, beginning in the early 1970s. His experimentations with color, and its absence, led him to be considered a pioneer of Pittura Analitica, or analytical painting. Gastini's works reflect a fascination with nontraditional materials that became synonymous with arte povera—the Italian art movement of his generation. His works, made from raw and unrefined charcoal, iron, plaster, wood, canvas, and pigments, are based on a notion of expressive freedom rather than on a reductivist aesthetic practice. For example, in "Velato e rivelato" (Veiled and revealed, 1994), he arranged over ten rectilinear swatches of canvas on the wall, tracing the form they create, with branchlike constructions of scrap iron extending from both canvas and wall. In the later years of his career, the use of color, along with the most diverse materials, took over powerfully. Gastini's work continued to evolve, always maintaining a focus on space, energy, tension, involvement, and the interaction between the work and its context. His exhibition activity and collaboration with Italian, European, and American galleries remained intense until his passing in 2018. Marco Gastini's legacy is that of an artist who continually pushed the boundaries of painting, exploring the interplay between material, space, and expression. His work invites viewers to reconsider the nature of painting and its potential to engage with and transform space.

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