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Lot Essay
Part painting, part architectural intervention, Superficie bianca is a superb example of Enrico Castellani's ground-breaking Superfici or ‘Surfaces’. Created in 1983, one year prior to his exhibition at the 41st Venice Biennale, the work captures the elemental forces which govern our existence. These dynamic, rippling works were created by stretching a monochromatic canvas over a lattice of nails, resulting in a mesmeric distortion that revels in the complex interplay of depth and façade, absence and projection. In doing so Castellani toyed with traditional divisions between painting and sculpture, landing upon a format in which he could explore the physical manifestation of space and light. ‘The need to find new modes of expression is animated by the need for the absolute', he declared. '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’ (E. Castellani, ‘Continuità e nuovo’, Azimuth, No. 2, Milan 1960, n.p.).
Castellani began experimenting with his Superfici during the late 1950s, and methodically pursued this format over the next five decades. The series served as the material response to the artist’s call—first voiced in the radical art journal Azimuth which Castellani cofounded with Piero Manzoni—for an art based solely on the concepts of time, space, and light. Determined to wrest art away from illusionistic representation, Castellani sought to rid his canvases of subjectivity and figurative imagery. This almost dogmatic ascetism can be seen in the white austerity of Superficie bianca: as Castellani declared, ‘A white empty surface is the most abstract thing one can possibly imagine’ (E. Castellani, quoted in Enrico Castellani, exh. cat. Fondazione Prada, Milan 2001, p. 17).
The Superfici stand among the most important works to emerge from post-war Italy, taking their place alongside Manzoni’s Achromes and Lucio Fontana’s tagli. Whereas painting once functioned as a mirror to the world—a site onto which reality could be arrested—these artists transformed the flat pictorial plane into a self-defining object. ‘The surface,’ Castellani wrote, ‘which has, on various occasions, described, alluded and suggested, and has been the scene of idylls, dramas and raving, is now silent’ (E. Castellani, quoted ibid., p. 16). As well as chiming with the aesthetics of the ZERO movement in Northern Europe, the Superfici also served as an important influence on the development of Minimalism in America, whose proponents similarly sought an autonomous existence for art. In their quest to achieve aesthetic neutrality, Castellani’s Superfici offered a new means to strive for the infinite, eloquently embodied in the present work's pure, undulating expanse.
Castellani began experimenting with his Superfici during the late 1950s, and methodically pursued this format over the next five decades. The series served as the material response to the artist’s call—first voiced in the radical art journal Azimuth which Castellani cofounded with Piero Manzoni—for an art based solely on the concepts of time, space, and light. Determined to wrest art away from illusionistic representation, Castellani sought to rid his canvases of subjectivity and figurative imagery. This almost dogmatic ascetism can be seen in the white austerity of Superficie bianca: as Castellani declared, ‘A white empty surface is the most abstract thing one can possibly imagine’ (E. Castellani, quoted in Enrico Castellani, exh. cat. Fondazione Prada, Milan 2001, p. 17).
The Superfici stand among the most important works to emerge from post-war Italy, taking their place alongside Manzoni’s Achromes and Lucio Fontana’s tagli. Whereas painting once functioned as a mirror to the world—a site onto which reality could be arrested—these artists transformed the flat pictorial plane into a self-defining object. ‘The surface,’ Castellani wrote, ‘which has, on various occasions, described, alluded and suggested, and has been the scene of idylls, dramas and raving, is now silent’ (E. Castellani, quoted ibid., p. 16). As well as chiming with the aesthetics of the ZERO movement in Northern Europe, the Superfici also served as an important influence on the development of Minimalism in America, whose proponents similarly sought an autonomous existence for art. In their quest to achieve aesthetic neutrality, Castellani’s Superfici offered a new means to strive for the infinite, eloquently embodied in the present work's pure, undulating expanse.