Enrico Castellani (1930-2017)

Striations of red rise and recede across Enrico Castellani’s Superficie Rossa, 1985, a vivid example of the artist’s long-lasting meditation on an infinite surface. In 1959, Castellani began his celebrated series of Superficies, for which the artist drove nails into the back of a canvas to produce a rippling surface geometry. Striving to negate figural expression, Castellani sought to rid his canvases of the artist’s hand by insisting upon an artificial detachment. Initially using multiple colours in the Superficies, Castellani settled on the purity of monochrome, a decision which art historian Germano Celant noted ‘mutes the application of the paint and the brushstroke, and therefore the maker’s gesture’ (G. Celant, ‘Behind the Picture: Enrico Castellani’, Enrico Castellani, exh. cat., Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2001, p. 16). Indeed, in the uniform red of Superficie Rossa is the visual embodiment of Castellani’s hope for an aesthetic neutrality. As the artist himself declared, ‘The need to find new modes of expression is animated by the need for the absolute. To meet this requirement, the only possible compositional criterion is that through the possession of an elementary entity – a line, an indefinitely repeatable rhythm and a monochrome surface – it is necessary to give the works themselves the concreteness of infinity that may endure the conjugation of time, the only conceivable dimension – the yardstick and the justification of our spiritual need’ (E. Castellani, ‘Continuità e nuovo’, Azimuth no. 2, Milan, 1960, n. p.).