White Surface, 1964, acrylic on canvas, 31 1/2 × 39 3/8 in.
©Foto Massimo Listri
Enrico Castellani
After graduating from the Brera Academy in 1952, Enrico Castellani moved to Brussels, where he enrolled first at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, and later in the Faculty of Architecture. In 1956, he graduated and returned to Milan, where he began working in the studio of the architect Tomaso Buzzi, with whom he collaborated until 1963. In Milan he became friends with Piero Manzoni, with whom in 1959 he founded the magazine Azimuth and the Azimut gallery and shared the experience with the Zero and Nul groups. In the same year he made his first relief work, modeling the flat surface of the canvas to produce a rhythmic extroflexion in a context of “different repetition.” From the 1960s onward, his exhibition activity intensified: in 1964, he participated in the Venice Biennale and the Guggenheim International Award in New York; in 1965, he exhibited a large work entitled Superficie Bianca (White Surface) at MoMA in New York and represented Italy at the São Paulo Art Biennial in Brazil; in 1966, he held a solo exhibition in a room at the Venice Biennale and won the Gollin Prize. In 1967, he was awarded a gold medal at the Art Biennale of the Republic of San Marino and first prize at Nagaoka Museum in Tokyo. In the early 1970s, he moved to Celleno, in the province of Viterbo, and from this time on he participated in several group exhibitions, for instance at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1981, Palazzo Reale in Milan in 1983, Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1994, Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2014. He returned to the Venice Biennale in 1984 and 2003. His solo exhibitions include those held at Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2001, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in 2005 and the Auditorium in Rome in 2006. In 2010, he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting in Tokyo. In 2013, he created the Enrico Castellani Foundation which, in addition to collaborating with institutions, museums and scholars, focuses mainly on certifying the works and protecting, preserving and promoting his legacy.
Enrico Castellani’s first relief surface, made in 1959, is the result of the artist’s investigation on the potential expansion of the space of the canvas and on the new ways of conceiving the work of art and the “painting.” The working method created by the artist is a true system, which is expressed in endless variations: it is efficient, competitive, and still relevant today. In his later works, Castellani explored the infinite number combinations underlying the regular sequences of prominences and fissures, seeking to confirm the possibility of an exact use of space. The skillful management of light and shadow in the surfaces emphasizes the structure of the work, suggesting the predominance of aspects such as time, space and variation, in relation to composition, as implied by White Surface. The work, made in embossed canvas painted in white, is characterized by a series of evenly spaced dots, confined to the center of the painting. The piece is dominated by tensions and internal contrasts that develop horizontally, pushing toward the extreme limits of the painting. The patterns of Castellani’s surfaces, in their precision and in the ritual quality of their composition, were interpreted in almost contemplative terms by Carla Lonzi, who wrote in 1964: “hypothetical objects of worship for a modern religiosity, but—without pushing in directions that might lead to misunderstandings— we prefer to feel them in their indeterminacy as ‘ideal places of contemplation.’” (Federico Sardella)