Giovanni Gastel. Masks and Ghosts

The image of beauty, the triumph of life, is fleeting. It enhances the mask of the body and represents its sublime aspect. However, beneath its effigy lurks the spectre of passing time, so that the figure representing it already hints at the ghost of decay. For this reason, Giovanni Gastel, who for decades has been committed to exalting beauty, both feminine and masculine, artificial and natural, in this series entitled Masks and Ghosts tends to transform the sublime into the horrific, the vital into the tomb-like. Published on the occasion of the Milan exhibition, the volume presents 70 unpublished images of female figures in which the mirror of photography, instead of reflecting their almost supernatural beauty, as is the task of fashion, documents their transient and abysmal appearance: presences that come from another world.