Andrea Aste is a multimedia visionary artist and animator, published author and illustrator. He creates the most beautiful tarot decks, as well as a magazine devoted to esoterica, The Discombobulator. We stock his decks and the magazine in store.
Can you tell us a little about your background?
I have lived many lives, in different cities and different countries. I am restless, both in my art and in my life. I have always felt the irresistible call of adventure. My ancestors were explorers, sailors, and settlers from the Republic of Genoa. They too lived many lives, from slaves in Africa to settlers in Sardinia. Perhaps the urge to keep moving is written in my genes. I was born Italian, but I have always felt Italy to be too small a place, too confining. I do not believe in nations; they are made for dividing. I have loved Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, their cultures, their rhythms, their ways of seeing the world. The world is so vast, so astonishingly beautiful. I am endlessly curious. I love learning new languages, tasting food I have never tried before, listening to music I have never heard, exploring unfamiliar ideas, different points of view, and new artistic media. Yet I am also a son of the Mediterranean. Its colours, its fragrances, its many cultures and countless languages are part of my soul. If I close my eyes, I can still see its waters.
More than anything, I think what defines me are my passions. I love books. The older they are, the better. Lost languages. Forgotten ciphers. In high school I studied Latin and Ancient Greek, an experience that changed my life. Being able to read Homer, Ovid, Aeschylus, and Sophocles in their own words is to open a door into another way of thinking. It changes not only what you know, but how you see. I have always been fascinated by philosophy, history, and the natural sciences. When I am not creating, I am usually bent over a book, reading, studying, and exploring another corner of the infinite labyrinth of human knowledge.
Where are you based now?
After eight years of a happy life in London, during a cold winter I was invited by a friend to explore the North: Yorkshire, County Durham, Northumberland… I fell in love. The landscape has a lyrical and almost mystical quality. It carries an ancestral memory: towering castles, romantic ruins of monasteries, breathtaking cathedrals… and, here, Nature expresses herself with such overwhelming power and beauty.
I returned to London only long enough to pack and move back North. Now, I have been living in the shadows of Durham Cathedral for four years… but soon I will move again, towards the coast, to a small village where I will build the studio I have dreamed of for far too long.
What made you decide to become an artist and writer rather than a scientist?
When I was a little kid, I lived in Buenos Aires. One day my aunt took me with her when she went to consult her Bruja-Curandera (a witch and healer). She was a large woman with a square face, her dark skin crossed by deep wrinkles. She prepared some herbs for a tea and strange concoctions for my aunt, then she looked into my eyes with an intensity that seemed to last forever and, with a smile, she told her: “Él es un estrellero” (he is an estrellero).
In the vastness of the pampas, the immense Argentine prairie, the night sky is lit by a dense scattering of bright stars, a marvel of flickering lights. It is so beautiful that even horses cannot help but stare at the firmament… but when a horse looks at the stars for too long, legend says it loses its mind and begins to run, chasing the stars in a state of wild frenzy. Estrellero is the name gauchos, the Argentine cowboys, give to such horses. The word literally means “one who chases the stars…”. My aunt was not at all happy about the prediction. For her, it sounded more like an ominous omen!
Years passed, and after my university degree in Philosophy of Language, I was thinking only of remaining in the academic world and pursuing my long-coveted PhD. So I started working as a copywriter in an advertising agency to earn money to continue my studies at the Columbia University in New York. And then something unexpected happened. I began to play with poetry, to write short stories, and to illustrate them. I started painting… Soon one painting called for another canvas; one book inspired a new piece of writing; exhibitions and publishers followed. My creativity exploded, and I soon embarked on further adventures: animation, interactive art, and theatre.
The words of that strange old woman kept returning to my mind… and finally I understood. Following a star can be interpreted as a metaphor for following the multicoloured butterflies of our dreams. I discovered my starry night, and I never allowed my eyes to look elsewhere. I became, perhaps, a little mad… or simply inspired. I made a leap into mystery, out of my comfort zone. I left my job and began living by following my dreams. I never even started my PhD.
I became an estrellero…
Why did you choose to create card decks?
Everything began with the idea of celebrating my childhood and its magic. My mother was a tarot reader. She had the extraordinary gift of weaving amazing stories around the cards, creating an atmosphere of wonder and enchantment. We grew up surrounded by ghosts, legends, and the mystery of the occult. Sometimes she even used the tarot to outwit my brother and me.
“The cards are telling me it’s time for you to go to bed…”
And if the cards were speaking… you obeyed.
Thus, I began creating a tarot deck of my own. But before long, the cards seemed to take on a life of their own. They started to whisper stories. I began having visions of an alchemist creating the very first tarot deck ever made. The cards I was illustrating became that very deck, the discovery of an archaeological excavation. Around them, an entire world unfolded, suspended between reality and fiction, where historical fact intertwined with fantasy.
That original deck eventually evolved into The Book of Shadows: The Lost Code of Tarot, and The Book of Shadows: An Alchemist’s Story, an ever-expanding multimedia universe comprising a feature film, a graphic novel, multiple tarot decks, and much more. The deck had become a portal to a world where magic was still alive, and the entire project transformed into an exploration of the nature of tarot itself, and of the mystery that has always surrounded it.
What makes a really great card deck?
This is an intriguing question. I believe everyone has their own answer. For me, a deck is a magical portal, a window opening onto the hidden dimensions of our soul and mind. It is a liminal space beyond time and place.
Not every deck becomes such a portal. From my point of view, for a deck to be truly magical it must be multilayered: a mystical stratification of symbols, philosophical and psychological ideas, multiple levels of meaning, and references to art, culture, mythology, and the complexity of the world itself. At the same time, however, a deck must remain accessible. Anyone should be able to use it, and everyone should be free to decide how deeply they wish to venture. Some readers will remain on the threshold; others will journey into its deepest chambers. If you have done your work well, you create not merely beautiful illustrations, but images that work; images capable of leading the reader beyond the threshold, where the real magic begins.
How do you want people to feel when they look at your work?
Do you remember when you were a child and, at night, switched off the light? Suddenly, the room seemed to acquire a different dimension, to expand, to breathe, taking on a life of its own. Shadows danced upon the walls. Eyes peeped from the darkness. Strange creatures paced across the creaking wooden floor. It was a world of danger and fear, but also of wonder and suspense.
That is how I would love people to feel when they approach my work, whether it is a tarot deck, an animation, or a book. I would love them to forget everything they think they know and simply venture into the unknown, embracing the thrill and anticipation that every new adventure brings. Everything I create revolves around a single gravitational centre: the belief that magic, in every sense of the word, is the science of the imagination. My art has but one purpose: to help people set their imagination free once more, allowing them simply to be playful, be themselves, to become a child again, naïve, open, spontaneous and surrender to whatever awaits them.
Which artists and writers inspire you?
My mind is an omnivorous, rather strange beast. Almost everything touches my soul and inspires me, from music to art, from books to films. I think one of the greatest muses of my life has been Italo Calvino, one of the most imaginative minds of the last century. He created visionary books. He belongs to the lineage of Jorge Luis Borges, bending language through impossible situations filled with philosophy, ideas, and a profound sense of irony. Have a look at The Invisible Cities, my favourite book he ever wrote, and you will understand why. Imagine Marco Polo describing to Kublai Khan the cities of his empire… except they are cities of the imagination: invisible, impossible, poetic.
I am incredibly fond of poetry. I cannot live without Federico García Lorca, Nâzım Hikmet, Edgar Lee Masters, Walt Whitman, C. P. Cavafy, Ovid, Homer, and, of course, Shakespeare. I am, after all, a hopeless bookworm!
Visually, the artists who have influenced me the most are Hundertwasser and German Expressionism, particularly movements such as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter. I have also been deeply inspired by the pioneers of cinema: Georges Méliès, Fritz Lang, and F. W. Murnau. When I first began creating animation, they were constantly in my thoughts. And then there is the master of them all: Hayao Miyazaki, whose work represents, to me, the perfect union of image and poetry.
What new projects do you have in the pipeline?
Many, and never enough. I live in my fantasy; I always have new ideas to develop and explore.
First, I would like to refine and expand The Discombobulator, the esoteric magazine of the unseen and the unexpected. It is one of my biggest dreams: a magazine that connects the world through the thread of esotericism. It is the first esoteric magazine created with the quality and vision of an art magazine, where art meets arcane knowledge and storytelling reveals hidden truths. I have very big dreams for it.
As soon as I move into my new studio, I will begin creating a series of works for an exhibition based on my tarot world. I would like to experiment with clay, creating strange and intriguing objects that seem to come from my fictional (but is it really fictional?) city of Sapientia, the place where tarot is said to have originated.
I love animation and collaboratiång with musicians. I have started an exciting project with a very well-known epic metal band, and we are having an extraordinary amount of fun with it.
In my spare time, I would love to complete a deep book on tarot, written from a very particular perspective; one that brings together all my passions and studies.
And then… to dream, and dream more, and then a little more again. My door is always open for Dream…
Find more Andrea here.
