«Baci Gió» (xx Gió) was always his signature in his messages as if he always wanted to give you a caress on your face. The kindness that distinguished him had the same delicacy as his winged women, a delicacy that was sometimes melancholic, but which allowed him to instil a unique tenderness. Giovanni Gastel cannot only be defined as a great photographer: he was also a writer and poet – an aesthete, capable of expressing his soul in every form of art. His works had one important element in common: an unrestrained and almost obsessive search for beauty. In the preface to one of his books, he wrote: «Beauty creates deep bonds. Beauty is indeed a personal and intimate relationship but, like love, it also grafts a strong signal of sharing deeply within us. There is a kind of vertigo in beauty, almost a need to annul oneself, a call to the abyss. Beauty doesn’t calm me down but attracts me like a drug». We can therefore define Giovanni Gastel as an exasperated perfectionist who affirms that beauty is a unique and absolute value. For these reasons, it seems reductive to define Gastel only as a photographer; we can define him more as a visionary who expresses his joys and sorrows through art. «I’ve always been more interested in what I glimpsed than what I saw directly. The real as a cue. Peripheral vision brings with it stimuli and details that are often more attractive and interesting than central vision» says Giovanni. Through his surreal shots and melancholic poems of disarming depth, he succeeds in communicating the incommunicable, in conveying his fragile soul, and in making us see worlds that would otherwise be invisible and absent.