Antonio Nasuto - Volti rivolti

Antonio Nasuto graduates in Architecture from the University of Naples, where he subsequently completes a three-year specialization in Design. This multidisciplinary training decisively influences his visual language, marked by rigorous composition and attention to the structure of the image.
He is currently a professor of Artistic Anatomy at the Academy of Fine Arts of Foggia, pairing his teaching with ongoing painting research focused on the human body and the narrative dimension of the figure.
He has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally and internationally. Among the main ones: the solo exhibitions at the Palazzetto dell’Arte in Foggia (2002, 2003), the group show dedicated to P. P. Pasolini at the Tribunale della Dogana in Foggia (2007), 150 Souvenirs d’Italie at the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art “Atelier degli Artisti” in Rome (2011), Il filo di Arianna. Labirinto fisico e mentale at Palazzo delle Arti Beltrani in Trani (2011), the solo show at Palazzo Ducale Paternò Caracciolo in Pietramelara (2013) and L’ospite inatteso at Villetta Barrea (2016).

With “Faces Turned” Antonio Nasuto seems to initiate, or make more explicit, a line of inquiry that has long threaded through his painting: the human figure captured at the moment it withdraws its face from sight. It is not merely a compositional choice. By depriving the body of the possibility of being recognized through the face, the artist shifts the attention to posture, skin, muscle tension, gesture, and especially to the direction of the gaze, which, even when not visible, is continually evoked.
In the painting, a nude woman is depicted from behind, bathed in a warm light that precisely models the back and turns anatomy into an emotional surface. The head, slightly turned, seems to hint at a possible return of the gaze, but the face remains inaccessible. It is this suspension between showing and withholding that generates the tension of the work.
The title Faces Turned also introduces a refined linguistic play: faces evokes the face as the place of identity, while turned indicates orientation, a movement toward someone or something. The painting thus seems to question not so much what the figure shows, but what it decides not to show.
The painting finds meaningful correspondences in Nasuto’s other works, in which the figure viewed from behind becomes a narrative device: from the figure juxtaposed with the mannequin of Seven redhearts, where the real body and the artificial one seem to confront each other through their different identities, to the figure of Awaiting Katrina, immersed in a landscape and turned toward a horizon we cannot share. Even in works such as The Silliest Sin of the Devil Is Vanity, the face and corporeality become elements of a larger narrative, in which identity is never fully available to the viewer.

Faces Turned can thus be read as the title of a series rather than a single painting: a sequence of bodies that, turning away, seem to withhold our curiosity and precisely for this reason end up telling us something deeper. The face disappears, but the person remains; identity is not shown, it is imagined.