Art e Dossier

Gaspare Lombardo Castiglione
Brain/ Power/ Total Art

Gaspare Lombardo Castiglione, a mature artist who interprets the total art concept as a commitment to social themes. His wide-ranging and complex works vary from film and theatre set designing to mixed performances and paintings. These include installations of colour and collage, metropolitan expressions with many hues of reality and a multiplicity of signs, apparently fragmented, but in truth a manifestation of sense-significance that the artist involved selects from chaos. The choice is instant and full of passion, the inception is conceived, the ideal, the “meaning”. As such the artist is able to declare himself a “man”, he feels and senses this, the protagonist of his own life and of life in general. Graphically, chromatically and theoretically speaking he is a romantic, proposing ideals for which he fights for and the inference struggle for affirmation of the man/freedom against all forms of Power/Denial in all things. The inner struggle is defined and organized through whichever expressive means are necessary.
The Gallery includes 5 categories: “Body Art Actions” represents being present within the expanded body while contrasting the annulment of external factors. “Passion and Torment” a romantic mood, elegant, poetic. “Power” where at times, to portray the insidious insinuations, reign caption images as much as Power constitutes the anthropologic symbol of “immortality”, of that very life denied by power itself which becomes contradictory with chromatic and graphic contrasts. “Bio-Energy” represents the only concrete, solid and polymorphic reality of existence. “Brain” through oil and mixed media is the sublimation of each instant of daily metaphysical thought (under the influence and citation of Magritt) transcendent beyond the usual obstruction of captivating Power. Perhaps the most classical series, aesthetically complete, organically diversified and juxtaposed, so orthodox and yet so innovative: dream-like and surreal images, pure graphic expression, intense colours and well-defined in all hues and tones. Brain elevated above lunar landscape, buoyantly sustained by forms created by the pictorial matter. The theatrical performance entitled Specchio non mente, from mime to buffoonish comedy offers the spectacle of a joke played by a satyr in an Arab labyrinth: Power seduces, overwhelms, encompassing and crushing it to re-launch the diabolic spiral, triggered by a maddened Pan who corrupted slips away to avoid his dissonant reflected image as he plunges into his curse (as the mirror discovers and evidences asymmetry) screeching out the eternal lie.

Marga Esposito