Giorgio Rastelli was born in Milan in 1940. He attended Brera and other art schools. Since 64 he has exhibited in various Italian and foreign galleries. After an initial research between the formal and the informal, Rastelli arrives with the use of wood to new figurative solutions, the protagonist being the female figure. In '85 he began to insert color on the sculptures to underline the dynamism. In 2001 Rastelli created his largest sculptural work, the "Whale", for the Geological Museum of Castell' Arquato. Great personal exhibition, in 2002, in the Leonardesque stables of the Castello Di Vigevano, organized by the Municipality. In 2003 installation "Cenerentola" for the Museum of Footwear at the Castle of Vigevano, he was also chosen as the artist representing the idea of energy for the exhibition "International Energy Forum" in Rimini where a blue wave, 42 meters long, becomes the narrative background of the movement of the sculptures His works are exhibited at the Seibu Foundation in Tokyo, at the Photography Museum in Hanover, at the Crema Museum and at the Zavattarello Castle Museum. He lives and works in the Piacenza countryside.
Thus writes of the artist Ugo Nespolo: «In Giorgio Rastelli the virtuosity, the exaltation of dexterity, the ability to give life to a wooden universe knowing how to eliminate its fixity, hardness, rigidity that would seem obligatory. Giorgio Rastelli's world is a world of graceful but not affected figures, erotic but very ironic, narrative but rich in conceptuality. I know that the artist's project is not limited only to the female universe but instead extends to all of nature and to the animal world in particular. How can we forget the extraordinary Balena of 2000 whose gigantic dimensions (more than 10 metres!) reaffirm how Rastelli knows how to give a real vital breath to a material that one would imagine rigid and inexpressive. The tradition of polychrome wooden sculpture has distant roots not only in Western art. Rastelli quite parodying the sensual-sporting attitudes in his works stages a universe of cultured (and as if stolen) movements from the suppleness of the movement, to the exaltation of the athletic gesture, up to the coquetry of certain attitudes which enhances that air of lightness and of desirable beauty. Perhaps in recent years it is a matter of being able to redefine the very concept of "beauty" knowing full well that it is implausible and quite artificial to try to trace parameters that return from the past into art. In short, beauty cannot be the exhumation in a contemporary key of forms, models and ideas from the past. If beauty were only "harmony" we should all embark on the rediscovery of a new measure, perhaps a new "golden section" model of proportion and balance».
Elisabetta and Paolo De Angelis are the creators of OLD – American Design And Art, a gallery that has been carrying out research activity in the United States for over 30 years and above all a work of restoring collectible furnishings and juke boxes characteristic of American culture of the early 900s: a journey into the near past, a journey into the collective imagination: the years between the two wars, the objects of nascent design, the real places and the imaginary places of the mythical capital of American cinema. Today, OLD offers a collection of furniture and juke boxes sourced and selected directly in the USA, a choice of pieces that keep their modernity intact over the years, signed by the greatest designers of the time such as Donald Deskey, Kem Weber, Norman Bel Geddes, Gilbert Rhodes, Paul Fuller. The period between the two wars made it possible to recover the first examples of those everyday objects that influenced interior design and changed the way of life in general. In that period, in fact, American architects and designers reworked the influences of European Art Deco to the point of developing a series of completely autonomous and particular styles such as the "Machine Age" and the futuristic "Airstream" according to the taste of the colossal that always dominated overseas. In architecture, some of the most memorable buildings of this century arose such as the Chrysler Building and Radio City Music Hall in New York and the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles; the interior decoration of houses, offices, restaurants, public buildings was revolutionized by modernist stylizations; the designers created all types of furniture using the very new materials that technology made available to them: bakelite, formica, aluminium, chrome, all materials that were revolutionary at the time. Those interiors, those pieces of furniture are today considered classics of design and as such the OLD – American Design And Art Gallery intends to offer them, together with a series of original accessories from the same era, to interior designers and collectors as a real alternative to the codified pieces of the traditional antiques.
OLD - American Design And Art
Via Duchessa Jolanda 13/A – 10138 Turin
Tel +39 011 7713048 -
Mobile + 39 335 8383854
old@americandesignandart.com
www.americandesignandart.com –
