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拍品专文
This work is registered in the Archivio Enrico Castellani, Milan, under no. 63-004.
Miniature mountains and valleys punctuate the canvas in Enrico Castellani's Superficie rossa. This picture juts out from the wall, emphatically bursting into the third dimension with its various dips and protrusions. Created in 1963, this dates from only four years after Castellani had created his first Superficie. With these works, Castellani championed a new alternative to traditional painting: he took the most basic raw elements that underpinned the medium - canvas, paint, nails and stretcher - and reconfigured them to dramatic new effect, thus becoming one of the members of a select group of Italian artists active in the 1950s who revolutionised the entire notion of painting: Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, the last of whom he worked alongside. Like the works of all those artists, Superficie rossa introduces entirely new aspects to painting, not least the intense play of light of the articulated surface, which recalls Fontana's Teatrini and larger architectural projects alike
That Castellani's links to artists such as Fontana and Manzoni extended to more than their revolutionary status within the domain of painting is clear from his own words from 1960, which reveal some of the profound thinking that lay behind his works: 'The only possible composition criterion in our works... will be that which by way of the possession of an elementary, linear entity, indefinitely repeatable rhythm, monochrome surface, is necessary in order to give concreteness of the infinite to the works themselves, able to undergo the conjugation of time, the only conceivable dimension, yardstick and justification of our spiritual need' (Enrico Castellani in 1960, quoted in A. Zevi, 'The Gestural Concreteness of Castellani', pp. 63-69, B. Cor(ed.), Castellani, exh. cat., Pistoia, 1996, p. 68).
The regular lines of Superficie rossa, with the Braille-like pits and mounds that dominate the centre in their rectangular configuration, 'conjugate' time both through their existence as an orderly, geometric and almost mathematical progression, and through the process of creation that has brought them into existence. Castellani has reinvented the artistic gesture. At the same time, the very fact that this 'picture' has broached the traditional limitations of the medium reveals why Castellani would become such an important touchstone for many other artists. Indeed, it is a mark of the reception of his trailblazing works that only two years after Superficie rossa was created, he was named by Donald Judd as one of the crucial precursors of Minimalism in that movement's manifesto.
Miniature mountains and valleys punctuate the canvas in Enrico Castellani's Superficie rossa. This picture juts out from the wall, emphatically bursting into the third dimension with its various dips and protrusions. Created in 1963, this dates from only four years after Castellani had created his first Superficie. With these works, Castellani championed a new alternative to traditional painting: he took the most basic raw elements that underpinned the medium - canvas, paint, nails and stretcher - and reconfigured them to dramatic new effect, thus becoming one of the members of a select group of Italian artists active in the 1950s who revolutionised the entire notion of painting: Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, the last of whom he worked alongside. Like the works of all those artists, Superficie rossa introduces entirely new aspects to painting, not least the intense play of light of the articulated surface, which recalls Fontana's Teatrini and larger architectural projects alike
That Castellani's links to artists such as Fontana and Manzoni extended to more than their revolutionary status within the domain of painting is clear from his own words from 1960, which reveal some of the profound thinking that lay behind his works: 'The only possible composition criterion in our works... will be that which by way of the possession of an elementary, linear entity, indefinitely repeatable rhythm, monochrome surface, is necessary in order to give concreteness of the infinite to the works themselves, able to undergo the conjugation of time, the only conceivable dimension, yardstick and justification of our spiritual need' (Enrico Castellani in 1960, quoted in A. Zevi, 'The Gestural Concreteness of Castellani', pp. 63-69, B. Cor(ed.), Castellani, exh. cat., Pistoia, 1996, p. 68).
The regular lines of Superficie rossa, with the Braille-like pits and mounds that dominate the centre in their rectangular configuration, 'conjugate' time both through their existence as an orderly, geometric and almost mathematical progression, and through the process of creation that has brought them into existence. Castellani has reinvented the artistic gesture. At the same time, the very fact that this 'picture' has broached the traditional limitations of the medium reveals why Castellani would become such an important touchstone for many other artists. Indeed, it is a mark of the reception of his trailblazing works that only two years after Superficie rossa was created, he was named by Donald Judd as one of the crucial precursors of Minimalism in that movement's manifesto.