Superficie rigata

Held in the same private collection since the late 1990s, Superficie rigata is a rare work from Enrico Castellani’s distinctive series of shaped striped canvases. Executed in 1962, it is one of just seven such works that the artist created between 1961 and 1963, using found commercial material that he pulled over a wooden scaffold. Unlike many of his other Superfici, created by stretching monochrome canvas over a bed of rhythmically-placed nails, these works gain their illusory properties from the very qualities of the material itself: ribbons of dark blue and white create a scintillating optical friction that enhances the work’s billowing form, causing it to oscillate and undulate within the viewer’s field of vision. The present work made its public debut in the group exhibition Europa America—L’Astrazione Determinata at the Galleria d’Arte Moderne, Bologna, in 1976; more recently it featured in Castellani’s celebrated 2001 retrospective at the Fondazione Prada, Milan—home to another work from the series—as well as the touring exhibition Il Modo Italiano at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2006.

Castellani began making his Superfici in 1959. Caught between painting, sculpture and architecture, these works transformed the canvas from a support into the artwork in and of itself, liberating it from the burden of narrative and representation. Following in the footsteps of Lucio Fontana, whose seminal slashed canvases (Tagli) had succeeded in banishing the notion of the artwork as a window onto the world, Castellani sought to strip art back to its most basic principles, creating works that existed as independent, self-defining objects. While the present work seems to foreshadow the Op Art creations of artists such as Bridget Riley, Castellani’s use of found material also invokes the burgeoning aesthetics of Arte Povera, defined by the use of humble, everyday materials. At the same time, his treatment of the canvas as a multi-dimensional shaped object resonates with the work of Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly and other major proponents of American Minimalism. Castellani, notably, would exhibit alongside these artists in the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye, positioning his work firmly within the context of the international avant-garde.

The present work stems from a time of great productivity and exploration for Castellani. Three years earlier, he had founded the magazine Azimuth with his friend and comrade Piero Manzoni, placing him at the very heart of Milan’s thrilling contemporary art scene. The following year, the publication featured his seminal essay ‘Continuity and Newness’, while its accompanying gallery—Galleria Azimut—mounted his first solo exhibition. By 1962, Castellani had forged strong links with the contemporaneous ZERO movement in Northern Europe, participating in their exhibition Nul 2 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. That year, he also travelled to Herning in Denmark, where he had visited several years prior as part of a residency programme organised by the industrialist Aage Damgaard. Damgaard, who firmly believed in the integration between art and life, had encouraged participating artists to work alongside factory staff and to produce works for the factory itself; Castellani’s 1962 visit would see him design a petrol station for one of his friends. The shaped canvases, such as the present work, were in part a product of this newfound creative spirit, which prompted the artist to explore different techniques and media. Here, a basic utilitarian material is transformed into a dazzling optical spectacle, reborn as an object of elemental wonder.