Cayón is pleased to present an exhibition by Enrico Castellani (1930-2017), taking place from February 10th until April 14th in our two Madrid spaces (Blanca de Navarra 7 and 9). This is the third Solo Show dedicated to the Italian artist at the gallery since 2018.
Enrico Castellani (1930-2017) trained in painting and sculpture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, a city where he also graduated in Architecture in 1956. After completing his studies, he returned to his country of origin where in 1959 he would found, together with Piero Manzoni, the Azimut Gallery in Milan. This space, associated with a publication under the name Azimuth (ending in h), would become a meeting point for the most innovative art.
Enrico Castellani’s work goes beyond the limits of painting, by integrating theoretical concepts of sculpture and architecture in order to explore and present a new plastic paradigm. Committed to carry out a redefinition of art, so to adapt to contemporary concerns, Castellani integrates light, color, space and movement in his pieces, through the use of different materials; transcending the flat surface of the canvas, the shadow cast by the convex surface on the concave being a fundamental element of the work. The shadow, in Castellani’s words, “is just as important as color or form.”
“We are not interested in expressing subjective and variable reactions to specific events. on the contrary, we wish to establish a continuous and harmonious discourse through fixed, immovable elements. We exclude these means of expression (composition, color and plasticity), being in themselves sufficient to give the works themselves concreteness of infinity, since they are elementary entities that can be merged in different ways in a work of art. They are indefinitely repeatable“.
This conception of the painting as a window into an infinite space is perhaps the one that best explains Enrico Castellani’s oeuvre. Through the mobility of these three elements, he achieves an infinite plastic succession.
The exhibition will feature ten works, which cover the last twenty years of the artist’s production, from 1989 to 2012. According to his principles, most of them are made on materials that achieve a strong quality of plasticity, which is observable by its defining characteristics both on the front and on the back of the work; so that, in turn, they function as a “quasi” tactile sculpture. “Enrico Castellani’s work is music to the eyes,” says Bruno Cora, art historian and critic, an excellent connoisseur of the Italian artist’s work.
Finally, and emphasizing the importance that the chromatic range had for Castellani, the works on display will present an array of the artist’s preferred choice of colors; those being white, red, and yellow.
Enrico Castellani, born in Castelmassa, Rovigo, in 1930, was one of the great protagonists of post-war Italian art. In 1952, he moved to Brussels to attend painting and sculpture class at the Académie des Beaux Arts In 1956, he graduated in architecture at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Cambre. The following year he returned to Italy, settling in Milan and becoming an active component of the new artistic scene.
In 1959, together with Piero Manzoni and Agostino Bonalumi, he founded the magazine “Azimut” which proposed the total elimination of the previous artistic experience and a new beginning, and fully centered on the concept of abstraction.
This zeroing was achieved with the use of monochromatic canvases with various techniques, to create effects of iridescent lights and shadows with the inclination of the light source.
The study and analysis of the possibilities offered by the bending of the canvas through the use of nails and ribs gave life to Castellani’s stylistic code that critics defined as “different repetition” from the careful repetition of full and empty spaces given by rhythmic extrusions of the canvases, constituting an unparallel new path.
Among the most recent exhibitions we recall the solo exhibitions at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2001, at Kettle’s Yard of Cambridge University, at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in 2005; and recently, in September 2012, at Ca’ Pesaro Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Venice, where his complexes “Doppio Angolare” were hung for the first time.
On October 13, 2010 Castellani received the Praemium Imperiale.
Enrico Castellani spent the last decades of his life in the small village of Celleno in Tuscia, where he passed away in 2017
Supeficie bianca (06-059-A), 2006
High surface relief in enamelled aerospace aluminum
77 x 58 (cm.)
CA035
Superficie bianca (06-070-D), 2006
High surface relief in enamelled aerospace aluminum
115 x 77 (cm.)
CA037
Polittico / 1 giallo 1 blu (08-055), 2008
High surface relief in enamelled aerospace aluminum
116 x 116 (cm.)
CA038
Superficie bianca (08-052-C), 2008
Double-sided high surface relief in enamelled aerospace aluminum with a steel base.
58 x 58 x 6 (cm.)
CA039
Superficie bianca (12-010-A), 2012
Double-sided high surface relief in enamelled aerospace aluminum with a steel base.
48 x 38 (cm.)
CA040
