Alessandro Nastasio is an important figure not only in Italian art but also in European art. He has been part of the great period for Italian art since the 1960’s with his highly symbolic art, as if symbol, sign and colour were to clear up even more the origin of his art which is both classic and modern at the same time.

The strongest and most significant developments of his career took place in Milan and Lombardy due to the civil interest aroused by his art. The artist has left examples of extreme beauty and religious significance with several public authorities and churches, providing not only paintings but also sculptures. Indeed the Ada Zunino gallery, the famous and only Italian sculpture gallery, recently exhibited some excellent examples of his work. Nastasio has worked on both demanding and lighter themes, which balance each other and merit further investigation.



Nastasio is a new painter of history but not in the realist sense, his true worth is that of having interpreted and re-written the long biblical epic contained in the books of the Old and the New Testament. He has been one of the few if not the only artist interested in pictorially re-writing the charm of certain stories with signs and colours, summarising and reducing, allowing the symbol to translate ancient ideas and parables in a new way. History and religion experience a series of sequences which have always interested this artist. He paints myths, legends, images, beasts, saints and divinities; and alongside this data there is also a landscape of water, land and sky as if a terrestrial paradise had yet to be represented.
Hues and substance, bright and strong colours give Nastasio’s paintings the strength to experience a period of great emotion; what should particularly be pointed out is that all the images and figures are stripped to the bare essentials but without falling into sterile abstraction. This essentialism gives strength to a sign which encloses the images, it is a sign-stroke that is painting, which surrounds and gives dimension and characterises. Then there are more frivolous themes, beauty, the divinities of love, dance. But all is reached not only through painting but also through drawing and collage which has appeared in more recent times.

The most illustrious names of Italian and foreign art criticism have mentioned his work, which has been taken all over the world with exhibitions in Switzerland, Germany, in Japan and in Africa. Nastasio is now to be considered a star of Italian painting, one of the very few artists who, in so many years of work has provided and consigned to history examples of resistant art, unlike what is often written in daily papers by journalist colleagues who not only know nothing about art but who cannot even read.
I say this to mean how often on the art pages of weekly magazines and daily papers we read about stars, presenters and models who suddenly begin to paint, attracting the attention of a certain type of media, whether it be right or left wing, with little interest in real art, in real names, in the historical grand masters, in professional painters. In his lifetime, Nastasio has been complemented many times, by the public and critics alike, by the market which is still alive for him more than ever, and by the comments of art historians and literature which have highlighted not only his themes but above all his unmistakable western, Mediterranean style with roots which come from contemporary times, but are fixed in the ancient, or better in the old history of the world.
Translated by interpres sas