Enrico Castellani

Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Renata Wirz and Federico Sardella, Enrico Castellani, Catalogo Ragionato, Tomo Secondo, Opere 1955-2005, Milan 2012, p. 537, no. 820, illustrated with border cropped

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality tends more towards true white in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals a few very unobtrusive pinprick-sized media accretions scattered in isolated places. There is some minor burnishing to the tips of the protruding elements, which is in keeping with the artist's choice of medium and working process. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Enrico Castellani’s series of Superficie paintings, of which Superficie Bianca is a superb example, are some of the most iconic Minimalist works of the Twentieth century. Transcending the confines of the canvas by combining elements of painting and sculpture, they reflect the primary concerns of the ZERO group, a short lived collective from the late 1950s and early 1960s, who sought to eliminate representational painting and invent a new creative language. In a similar fashion to various of his contemporaries, such as Lucio Fontana and Otto Piene, Castellani’s approach was to alter the substrate, making the canvas itself, rather than the paint on it, the subject of the work.

Despite the lyricism of the finished works, Castellani’s means of execution better reflect the methodical nature of the American Minimalists he was said to inspire. Sequentially hammering nails on either side of a latticework of wooden boards on the reverse of the canvas, Castellani’s systematic and considered process belies the organic beauty of the undulating surface, just as the apparent aggression of the nails is defied by the near-spirituality of the work.

Perhaps to a greater extent than any other artist of the ZERO group, Castellani’s palette forced the viewer to confront an elemental aspect of his work, that is, the role of light. If the craft and subject of the work is vested in the canvas, the aesthetic relies on the light that hits it. The ripples of miniature peaks and troughs are highlighted and accentuated by the alternating instances of light and shadow, which alter with the movement of both light and viewer. As a result, Superficie Bianca is as much as anything an experiential piece, where the viewer and his surroundings dictate the perception of the piece itself. In the words of one critic, Castellani and Pietro Manzoni, who together founded Azimut Gallery and the hugely influential Azimuth journal, “free themselves from traditional artistic practice and arrive at new representations made up of points of light” (Stephan von Wiese, ‘Il Grado ZERO nell’arte’, in: Exh. Cat., Siena, Palazzo della Papesse, ZERO 1958-1968, 2004, p. 15). This reductive approach, where art is rendered subservient to light, represents the culmination of the ZERO group’s desire to “free… art from every form of narrative or subjective pictorial expression in order to achieve a purification” (Bruno Cora, ‘Enrico Castellani: Art with the Semantic Value of Language’, in: Renata Wirz and Federico Sardella, Enrico Castellani, Catalogo Ragionata, Tomo Primo, Milan 2012, p. 13).

Superficie Bianca represents the apotheosis of both Castellani’s artistic theories and his craft. Representing a revolution of aesthetic practice when they were first displayed in 1959, the Superficie have lost none of their bite, and the subtle diagonals of the present work, along with the elegant shifts in depth and height between nails, make it a particularly alluring example of the Italian master’s silent symphony of light and shadow.