“Connection” by Lele Gastini
Review by Claudio Komarek
Faces that contain faces that contain stories that contain faces. It is quite a visual journey that of Gastini, just a simple surname or a simple surname for an original artist in a cyberspace made up of ambitious nicknames often obsessively searching for the latest English-speaking trend. But Gastini knows that his story is our story, and our story is everyone's story, immersed and lost in the endless sea of the infinite versions of us that belong to others, just as Pirandello used to tell it, just to say another un-English-speaking one but of so much essence.
The artist is really good at tying his peculiar stylistic and creative signature to an intriguing narrative concerning our contemporaneity. Gastini tells us about NFTs with an NFT, the world we live every day squeezed into a gratifying yet exhausting hyper connection, social networks, neural networks, distributed intelligence, decentralized lives, it is us multiplying and interchanging in a collective consciousness; this is the tale of the tale, it is the metaverse of the metaverse.
If philosophy can be reduced in essence to psychology, and psychology can likely be traced back to biochemistry, we could say that our inner workings are given by neural flow, which in turn is the synthesis of what we have seen and experienced; our life is the sum of our experiences, good and bad, our consciousness is the intersection of the thousand states of mind that have belonged to us. Our history is everyone's history, and the universe is a black thread that connects everything geographically, biologically, psychically.
Zigmut Bauman tells us about a liquid society in which individuals lose solid points of reference to explode in a tangle of frustrations generated by a consumerist model of relating to others. We brush against each other, we cyber-know each other but never have the time to delve deeper. Gastini's man is the 3.0 man who, with a doubtful expression, looks inward and perceives the vorticity of his own existence. The artist shows us an interpretive path to the deepening of our daily relational life, and a profound subliminal warning for a necessary deepening and a necessary search for a slower time in the assumption of the growth of a more complete individual consciousness.
The most cybernetic of visual poems, this depiction of humanity, a pulsating network of small hearts overwhelmed and scattered in the uninterrupted flow of trans-communications sometimes necessary, sometimes not.