Enrico Castellani

Galleria dell'Ariete, Milan

Galleriaforma, Genoa

Private Collection, Milan

Acquired from the above by the present owner in the 1970s 

Milan, Galleria dell’Ariete, Castellani, February 1972, n.p., illustrated

Genoa, Galleriaforma, Enrico Castellani, November - December 1972, n.p., illustrated 

Ravenna, Logetta Lombardesca, Enrico Castellani, June - September 1984 

Renata Wirz and Federico Sardella, Eds., Enrico Castellani, Catalogo Ragionato, Milan 2012, p. 178, illustrated in colour (Vol I); and p. 403, no. 314, illustrated (Vol. II) 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is lighter and brighter in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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A seminal figure in the landscape of post-war European art, over the past five decades Enrico Castellani has challenged the confines of painting, sculpture, and architecture through a manipulation of both the physical properties of his material and its immediate environment. Formed of a myriad of pointed protrusions and measured hollows, Gli Addii wavers in and out of focus; as with the best of Castellani’s work, geometric lines form and then disperse patterns in the viewer’s roving eye. Impressive in both scale and finesse, the present work’s spatial composition achieves an illusionary effect that distorts concepts of space, depth, light, and dark, and is a remarkable early example articulated in the purest expression of Castellani’s art: white. As a truly iconic utterance of the celebrated Superficie, this piece hails from the body of work that attained early international acclaim for Castellani and has absorbed his creative attention through to the present day. In so doing, the Superficie have cemented the artist’s position as a European innovator at the very forefront of a dialogue that scrutinises the illusionary and physical dimensionality of painting.

Having established his practice in the mid-1960s, Castellani’s art can be viewed as a reaction to the aftershock of the Second World War. Akin to many schools of thought at the time, particularly in Europe, there was a need to find a new expression for a totally new era, to wipe the slate clean and pair art back to its essential rudiments. Indeed, in opposition to the dramatic, colourful, and formless brush marks of the Abstract Expressionists, many European artists chose to re-define painting via monochromity and through a re-examination of the canvas itself. Following in the footsteps of his mentor, Lucio Fontana, Castellani approached the discourse of painting through artistic reduction in search of an elemental art that would reveal a true dimensionality beyond the traditional canvas ground. Where Fontana sought to open up the canvas by creating a cut in the surface, Castellani chose to extend the traditional surface of ‘painting’ into the physical space of the viewer. Further influenced by Fontana as well as the reductive work of Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, while bolstered by his fellow contemporaries Augusto Bonalumi and Paolo Scheggi, Castellani chose to employ the monochrome as his sole mode of expression. However, where Castellani and his generation differed was in their fundamental approach to the structure of the painterly support itself. Composed of a flawless white surface punctuated with a sequential pattern of nails hammered into place using a nail gun, Gli Addii is an exceptional illustration of this assiduous approach to the canvas.

In addition to creating a self-referential work devoid of representation, Castellani opened up the canvas to other philosophical dialogues on space and time. In the late 1960s space travel dominated the global political discourse and artists such as Fontana, Scheggi, and Bonalumi were at pains to emulate humanity’s exploration of a further dimension by exploring in turn the dimensionality of the picture plane. In Gli Addii the rhythmically punctuating peaks invite the viewer to consider a boundless spatial dimension and to become an active partaker in Castellani’s ardent pursuit of the absolute. Via monochromicity and a focus on paintings' most elemental components, Castellani radically redefined our understanding of medium specificity and therein proposed an alternative understanding of art altogether.