(born Castelmassa, Rovigo in 1930)
“Superficie grigia”, titled, signed, dated Enrico Castellani 1991 on the reverse, acrylic on shaped canvas, 100 x 100 cm, on stretcher (PP)

The work has been registered by the Archivio Castellani, Milan under the archive no. 91–025.

Provenance:
Formerly Collection Ambrosetti, Brescia
Private Collection, Italy

Literature:
R. Wirz, F. Sardella, Enrico Castellani, Catalogo ragionato, Vol. II, Opere 1955–2005, Milan 2012, page 511, no. 709 with ill.

“The truth is that monochromy was the last chance painting had to distinguish itself from the other arts; the surface that would previously be used in order to describe, refer to, or suggest something, and that would serve as the theatre of idylls, dramas and ravings, is now mute (...). There is no doubt that movement is the prerogative of today’s art, and that structure is an essential element of movement...”
(Enrico Castellani, Totalità nell’arte d’oggi, 1958, in “Zero”, no. 3, Düsseldorf, 1961)

In the 1950s, Enrico Castellani and his friends Piero Manzoni and Agostino Bonalumi were among the protagonists of the artistic scene in Milan. Together, they founded the “Azimut” gallery and its affiliated magazine in 1959, with the aim of promoting a radically new artistic experience that would eclipse its precedent. Unlike Manzoni, both Castellani and Bonalumi based their early formal research on the pictorial surface, and even during the following decades Castellani’s aesthetic conception would remain faithful to this means of artistic expression.
The concepts of infinite and absolute would be central, investigated in all their facets on monochrome surfaces made dynamic only by the presence of nails or other disturbing elements producing his shaped canvas (“tela estroflessa”). This applies to the present Superficie grigia (Grey Surface) that shows that as late as the 1990s the artist’s research still focused on the the creation of surfaces in which the modulation of the canvas generates light and shadow effects that are dynamic and poetic at once. As Castellani himself stated, “a surface makes room for infinite encounters, agonising waits, tautological commensurations, existential suffering and utopian substantiations” (in L’arte, la libertà, letter to Sandro Parmiggiani, Celleno, 3 July 1998).
In particular, the present Superficie Grigia bears witness to the artist’s research at the beginning of the 1990s, which aimed to increase the dynamism of his almost “optical” surfaces, far from the formal, modular rigour of the works he created in the 1960s.