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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the Archivio Enrico Castellani, Milan, under no. 67-045 and will be included in the forthcoming Enrico Castellani - Catalogo Ragionato delle Opere.
A Futuristic-looking white plane of dynamically contrasting monochrome form and surface, Superficie Bianca (White Surface) is a uniquely formatted work that belongs to a rare and important group of diptychs made by Enrico Castellani around the time of his first major exhibition in America at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1966.
This small but highly significant group of works, which includes the similarly-structured though rectangular Dittico NY N. 2 (Diptych No. 2) of 1966 now in the Prada Foundation and Superficie circolare bianca of 1968 (Archivio Castellani), are a radical and groundbreaking series of elaborately-shaped monochrome white canvases in which Castellani extended his unique aesthetic of 'surfaces' well beyond the conventional bounds of painting into an exciting, new and ultimately indefinable spatial dimension.
Emulating the bipartite structure of a work such as Dittico NY N. 2 but moving away from this work's more conventional rectangular format in favour of an even more unusual circular form, Superficie Bianca is comprised of two interlocking canvases. One is flat and near-circular in shape seeming to open onto a second wedge-shaped canvas that emerges from under it and whose regularly undulating surface appears to expand away from the circular monochrome canvas centre out into the space all around it. It is in this way that Superficie Bianca is a work that not only breaks down the conventional borderlines between painting and sculpture as well as between space, surface and material, but is also one that appears to anticipate and express a notion of the later, vast, and complete spatial environments that Castellani was to make in the late 1960s and early '70s.
Created in 1967 immediately after Castellani's return from America where he had met with and seen the work of many of the US's leading artists for the first time, Superficie Bianca takes the unconventional logic of the shaped-canvas, (which he had first pioneered in the late 1950s), to new extremes. Evocative of the Minimalist aesthetic which, as Donald Judd was among the first to point out, Castellani's work had helped to foster in America, Superficie Bianca is a work that plays directly with a complex and even self-contradicting sense of perspective. As can perhaps be more clearly seen in the rectangular diptychs from this time, and as he was later to do in the Spazio Ambiente that he would create for an entire room in 1970, Superficie Bianca articulates both an illusionary planar sense of perspective (through its Frank Stella-like lines on the flat circular canvas) and a contradictory spatial perspective (from the lines made by the undulating surface pattern created by his common practice of installing a sequence of nails pushing into the reverse of the canvas). In this unique work, this latter progression of undulating spatial form is one that, because the shape of the canvas echoes the perspectival progression suggested by the expanding lines, appears to extend outwards from the centre of the work and beyond, into the space of the room within which the diptych is set. In this way these two cojoined but contrasting canvases and perspectival progressions help to generate, without undermining it, an intriguing spatial ambiguity that appears also to invade and inform the real space of the room in which the painting is hung.
'I believe it is illegitimate and pretentious,' Castellani has said, 'to want to deform space in a definitive and irreversible manner, with the presumption, above all that one can influence the real world: at best this is a useless operation. At most it is permissible to structure it so as to make it perceptible to the senses: after all, space interests us and concerns us because it contains us. For this operation, I use monochrome surfaces, as immaterial as possible and shaped to form double curves with repeated elements: a series of points in relief and points forming depressions, negative and positive poles, and a series of minimal operative interventions. They are constituted by a flat membrane, the physical characteristics of which - elasticity and spatial continuity - are not altered by the process of formation... The structures resulting from this operation are matched by others that are both equal and opposite and thus cancel each other out in the organization of spatial totality. Reality, too, always has an obverse and a reverse that, by fitting together, deny each other in turn.' Enrico Castellani quoted in G. Celant, ed., Enrico Castellani, exh. cat., Milan, 2001, p. 243)
A Futuristic-looking white plane of dynamically contrasting monochrome form and surface, Superficie Bianca (White Surface) is a uniquely formatted work that belongs to a rare and important group of diptychs made by Enrico Castellani around the time of his first major exhibition in America at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1966.
This small but highly significant group of works, which includes the similarly-structured though rectangular Dittico NY N. 2 (Diptych No. 2) of 1966 now in the Prada Foundation and Superficie circolare bianca of 1968 (Archivio Castellani), are a radical and groundbreaking series of elaborately-shaped monochrome white canvases in which Castellani extended his unique aesthetic of 'surfaces' well beyond the conventional bounds of painting into an exciting, new and ultimately indefinable spatial dimension.
Emulating the bipartite structure of a work such as Dittico NY N. 2 but moving away from this work's more conventional rectangular format in favour of an even more unusual circular form, Superficie Bianca is comprised of two interlocking canvases. One is flat and near-circular in shape seeming to open onto a second wedge-shaped canvas that emerges from under it and whose regularly undulating surface appears to expand away from the circular monochrome canvas centre out into the space all around it. It is in this way that Superficie Bianca is a work that not only breaks down the conventional borderlines between painting and sculpture as well as between space, surface and material, but is also one that appears to anticipate and express a notion of the later, vast, and complete spatial environments that Castellani was to make in the late 1960s and early '70s.
Created in 1967 immediately after Castellani's return from America where he had met with and seen the work of many of the US's leading artists for the first time, Superficie Bianca takes the unconventional logic of the shaped-canvas, (which he had first pioneered in the late 1950s), to new extremes. Evocative of the Minimalist aesthetic which, as Donald Judd was among the first to point out, Castellani's work had helped to foster in America, Superficie Bianca is a work that plays directly with a complex and even self-contradicting sense of perspective. As can perhaps be more clearly seen in the rectangular diptychs from this time, and as he was later to do in the Spazio Ambiente that he would create for an entire room in 1970, Superficie Bianca articulates both an illusionary planar sense of perspective (through its Frank Stella-like lines on the flat circular canvas) and a contradictory spatial perspective (from the lines made by the undulating surface pattern created by his common practice of installing a sequence of nails pushing into the reverse of the canvas). In this unique work, this latter progression of undulating spatial form is one that, because the shape of the canvas echoes the perspectival progression suggested by the expanding lines, appears to extend outwards from the centre of the work and beyond, into the space of the room within which the diptych is set. In this way these two cojoined but contrasting canvases and perspectival progressions help to generate, without undermining it, an intriguing spatial ambiguity that appears also to invade and inform the real space of the room in which the painting is hung.
'I believe it is illegitimate and pretentious,' Castellani has said, 'to want to deform space in a definitive and irreversible manner, with the presumption, above all that one can influence the real world: at best this is a useless operation. At most it is permissible to structure it so as to make it perceptible to the senses: after all, space interests us and concerns us because it contains us. For this operation, I use monochrome surfaces, as immaterial as possible and shaped to form double curves with repeated elements: a series of points in relief and points forming depressions, negative and positive poles, and a series of minimal operative interventions. They are constituted by a flat membrane, the physical characteristics of which - elasticity and spatial continuity - are not altered by the process of formation... The structures resulting from this operation are matched by others that are both equal and opposite and thus cancel each other out in the organization of spatial totality. Reality, too, always has an obverse and a reverse that, by fitting together, deny each other in turn.' Enrico Castellani quoted in G. Celant, ed., Enrico Castellani, exh. cat., Milan, 2001, p. 243)