When the painter Luciano Castelli began posing for the camera in the early 1970s, he adopted a variety of roles, acting out every conceivable facet of himself. In utter disregard of gender distinctions, he variously transformed himself into an androgynous mythical creature and a glam rock diva. His virtuoso, surreal self-portraits, so far published only in limited form, are of an undiminished vibrancy in their playful eroticism and darkly narrative thrust. They reveal a hitherto underrated aspect of Castelli’s ouevre, which now, several decades later, could well be seen in an entirely new light. Very much in the spirit of the French psychoanalyst and art critic Jean-Michel Ribettes, who already in 2001 read Castelli‘s expressive theatricality as a timeless phenomenon and critique of a puritan society: „Castelli‘s expressive theatricality is there to protest at the confusion of a gregarious, prudish, vilely mercantile period.“
