Enrico Castellani

Galleriaforma, Genova
Galleria dell'Ariete, Milan
Acquired directly form the above by the present owner in the late 1990s

San Marino, Palazzo del Kursal, Oltre l'Informale, IV Biennale Internazionale d'Arte, 1963
Bologna, Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Europa America. L'Astrazione determinata 1960/1976, 1976, n.p., illustrated
Pistoia, Palazzo Fabroni, Castellani, 1996
Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Minimalia, 1998

Bruno Corà, Castellani, Milan 1996, p. 81, illustrated in colour
Achille Bonito Oliva, Minimalia. Da Giacomo Balla a...,  Milan 1997, p. 45, illustrated
Vittoria Coen, Enrico Castellani, Milan 1999, p. 47, illustrated in colour
Silvia Evangelisti, Annamaria Maggi, Enrico Castellani, Bergamo 2001, p.105, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper and richer. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is evident under ultra-violet light.
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"Our embodied need for the absolute forbids using the means which are those of pictorial language.  The only criteria possible for the composition in our works will be that criteria which does not imply a choice of space, which instantly defines what has been created to the point where it is denied any further development." (Enrico Castellani, 'Continuity and newness', in Azimuth, n. 2, Milan 1960, n.p.)

 

Freed from the burden of representation and evacuated from any trace of human presence, Enrico Castellani reviews the discourse of painting via a nihilistic reduction of the artwork to its rudimentary and objective evidence.  The non-additive, self-containment and introversion inherent to Castellani's practice is succinctly embodied by the series of "angular surfaces" produced throughout the 1960s.   From this body of work, Angolo Rosso, executed in 1963, is a significant and early example belonging to a small number of architecturally specific works created to inhabit an inverted corner.  Appearing to literally close in on itself, this painting irrefutably exemplifies the ground-breaking self-referentiality synonymous with Castellani's aesthetic.  Further evincing the pivotal significance of this work, Fondazione Prada chose an identical red corner painting as the catalogue front cover for the seminal Castellani exhibition held in Milan in 2001.  Moreover, twinned with the Prada Foundation's own red corner painting executed the very same year, and akin to the Superfice Angolare Bianca (1961) held in the Herning Kunstmuseum, Angolo Rosso stands as an exceptionally rare, museum-quality example of the most innovative period of Castellani's career. 

 

In the wake of the abstract gesture of Art Informel and the virile heroism of action painting, Castellani explored the reductivity of 'non-painting' as praxis for entering a new dimension and accessing the void beyond the canvas' surface.  Indebted to his artistic forbearers and pioneers of artistic reduction, Piet Mondrian and Lucio Fontana, Castellani looked to further expose the phenomenological inner-language of art through a heightened dedication to consistency, artistic absence, and the ideal of nothingness as the real domain of art.  While contemporaneously aligned with the aims of Yves Klein and the Zero Group, it was Piero Manzoni with whom Castellani found the greatest artistic affinity, co-founding the legendary Galleria Azimuth and the Azimuth journal together in 1959.  However, where Manzoni imparts the void by developing the plasticity of the tautological dialect between maker and object, Castellani focuses his attention on the immateriality of light and shadow.  

 

From 1959 Castellani dedicated his practice to the pursuit of the absolute via a rational, minimal, and introspective schema of intervention restricted purely to the delineated boundaries of the canvas.  During the 1960's this inquiry developed along two parallel lines; one in which the flat monochrome surface was modulated only by the convex and concave relief of canvas stretched over sequentially arranged nails; and the other in which Castellani began to "contrast real 'painting-objects' with their own situation of autonomous, self-contained, elements." (G. Dorfles, 'Enrico Castellani', in Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, Catalogo della XXXIII Esponzione Biennale Internazionale d'Arte, 1966, pp. 103-104).  Belonging to the latter, Angolo Rosso expands upon and simultaneously deconstructs the architecturally specific precedent of Vladimir Tatlin's constructivist Corner Reliefs (1915).  Castellani's minimal angular works cross the threshold between the surface of painting and the space of its locale.  The inverted red canvas evokes a dialectic with architectural volume that sets up an ambiguous tension between "painting and product, object and architecture." (Germano Celant, 'Behind the Picture: Enrico Castellani', in Exhibition Catalogue, Milan, Fondazione Prada, Enrico Castellani: 1958-1970, 2001, p. 15).  No longer does the support contain the work within the two-dimensional, rather Castellani situates the painting within a specific relationship to its three-dimensional architectural setting.  Large in scale and saturated in red (one of few pigments used by Castellani owing to its elementary status) Angolo Rosso behaves as a skin, coating and enveloping the divergent angles of the stretcher/corner to affect an immersion of our vision in pure surface, a surface moreover that swells outwards as an invasion into the volumetric space of its surroundings.

 

In contrast to the seemingly endless potential for patternation via protrusion and depression inherent to the reliefs that saturate Castellani's production, the angular works represent a rare and significant fraction of the artist's oeuvre.   Representing a mid-point, Angolo Rosso is an early indication of Castellani's most radical innovation – Spazio Ambiente first exhibited in Rome's Palazzo delle Esposizione in 1970.  A moment of extreme purism, the full scale and total immersion of this work embodies a resolution to the inquiry previously exemplified by Angolo Rosso.  By conflating the relief works with the architecture/object/painting dialectic provoked by Castellani's angular surfaces, this fully immersive installation takes the viewer behind and inside the real space of painting itself.  Thus, a pivotal and innovative work from the period which cemented Castellani's success, Angolo Rosso embodies the tension between immateriality, space, and art as object that would set the tone for Arte Povera from the mid-1960s onwards.