Enrico Castellani

Private Collection, Italy

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly warmer, tending more towards creamy-white in the original. Condition: This work is in good condition. A matrix of minute stable hairline cracks can be noticed to the extreme lower left corner tip. There is a faint intermittent rub mark running along the underside of the bottom edge, which does not interfere with the work's composition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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This work is recorded in the Archivio Castellani, Milano, under number 80-028

Belonging to a generation emerging immediately after Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting, Enrico Castellani sought to define a new method with which to approach the surface. His concern was shared by many artists of his time such as Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, with whom he set up an intense exchange and collaboration of ideas and experiences that led them to the foundation in 1959 of the review Azimuth, and the opening of the gallery with the same name. Castellani and Manzoni "set out in search of an object liberated from the tyranny of the unconscious and the irrational. They flee from naturalism, realism and the illusionism of the seen and the unseen.... They aspire not to possess such an object through the ego, but rather to petrify a knowledge, a process of seeing or feeling, to transform it into a thing, an autonomous, independent, immobile and durable thing." (Germano Celant, in Exhibition Catalogue, Milan, Fondazione Prada, Enrico Castellani: 1958-1970, 2001, p. 10)

 

Castellani's aim was indeed to turn the painting into a 'mental space', devoid of any figurative or gestural expression, a tabula rasa, an autonomous entity endowed with an independent life. The result was the Superfici, shaped monochrome canvases obtained by ordering rows of nails to create sequences of protruding points, which were then covered with stretched canvas. They exploit the relationship between space and light as dynamic elements in the process of defining the painting, while suggesting an intense visual meditation on fractured form.

 

The tight grid of positive and negative spaces in Superficie Bianca modulate the light, achieving a rhythmical and optical effect, which engages the viewer not only with the object, but with the issues of perception of the object itself.