The Erotic Intimacy of Giovanna Casotto: Flesh, Gaze, and the Inner Theater of Desire

The Italian cartoonist and illustrator Giovanna Casotto (born in 1962) is a singular force in the contemporary European erotic art scene. She has devoted her career to exploring the intimate, not the pornographic, not the abstract, but that flickering moment where fantasy first opens its eyes. Her art exists not in the domain of male-oriented erotic consumerism, but in the private architecture of desire, observed with a woman’s gaze turned inward. It feels cinematic, voyeuristic, dreamlike, and always tactile; it is a slow ritual of revelation rather than shock. Interestingly, she was so shy at the beginning of her career in the mid-nineties to publish her art under her own name so he first signed her illustrations with ‘Giovanni’, a masculine version of Giovanna, but she has come a long way since then in living her truth and so has society.

Fig.1   Vampirella, 1990s

Fig.2  Self made girl, 2001

Fig.3  In ginocchio! 

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Explicit Narrative

Giovanna Casotto’s visual language is unmistakable: chiaroscuro like film noir, pin-ups, sculpted light on the supple female skin, bare rooms, old-world interiors, solitary mirrors, mouth close-ups, stockings, garter clips, hairpins, whips, fingers holding silk underwear between shadow and lamplight. The environment is rarely about context, and it is hardly ever an explicit narrative. Instead, her panels are like doorways into moments we are not supposed to be seeing. Desire as atmosphere and desire as temperature. Desire as an almost sacred state, never rushed, never loud.

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Fig.7  La domenica del villaggio, 1990s

Artificial Porn Postures

What immediately distinguishes Casotto is that her erotic universe is not made for the male gaze, even though men often mistakenly assume it is. Her women are not performing. They are not arching their backs in artificial porn postures or presenting themselves to be seen in a certain way. There is no cartoon exaggeration. There is nearly always solitude. Her women are watching themselves, not being watched. They are touching themselves without spectacle, not inviting, not seducing, but exploring their own reality. It is self-eroticism, not exhibitionism. The closest aesthetic ancestor is not pornography at all, but Egon Schiele or Helmut Newton. Except Casotto’s women are not objects. They are subjects with agency and intent. The tension in her art comes not from exposed nudity, but from an almost unbearable intimacy, the moment before a gesture is made, the breath before surrender.

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In the extended Premium version of the article more on Casotto's mastery of the female body, insightful reviews of some of her illustrations, her unique ‘pop of colour’ technique, the psychological aspects in her work, numerous additional pics and MUCH more...!!

Click HERE for an earlier article on Casotto by professor of Art History Alexandre Rodrigues da Costa

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