(Castelmassa, Rovigo 1930 – 2017 Viterbo)
Superficie bianca, 1983, signed, dated and titled on the reverse, acrylic on shaped canvas, 180 x 180 cm, within plexiglass case

This work is registered in the Archivio Castellani, Milan and is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity.

Provenance:
Galleria Pero, Milan
Tornabuoni Arte, Florence
Sale Sotheby’s London, 20 October 2008, lot 28
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Pistoia, Enrico Castellani, Studio La Torre, 1983
Milan, Enrico Castellani. Superfici 1960 – 1980, Galleria Pero, February – March 1984
Paris, Enrico Castellani, Tornabuoni Arte, 14 October –
15 December 2011, exh. cat. p. 127, with ill.

Literature:
Exh. Catalogue, Florence, Centro Tornabuoni, Maestri della Pittura Moderna. Opere Scelte 1989-1990, 1989, p. 21,
with ill.
Exh. Catalogue, Perugia, Centro Espositivo Rocca Paolina, Trilogia 4. Castellani - Fogliati - Albanese, 1994, p. 10, with ill.
P. Magri (ed.), Frammenti di universi paralleli, in “Arte In”, Venice, October – November 2011, p. 65
M. Codognato (ed.), Monocromia ultima chance della pittura, in “Arte”, Milan, October 2011, p. 112
R. Wirz, F. Sardella (ed.), Enrico Castellani, Catalogo Ragionato: Opere 1955-2005, Skira, Milan, 2012, Vol. II, p. 468, no. 551, with ill.

As we read in Enrico Castellani's collection of writings (Scritti, Milan 2021, p. 16), he considers monochrome to be 'painting's last chance to differentiate itself from other arts'. We have an example of this here in the large relief canvas entitled Superficie bianca (White Surface), created by the artist in 1983.

For Castellani, colour is no longer a constituent element of the composition, understood as a means to delineate an image, but a material component that acts as a filter spread over the support according to the luministic effect he wants to achieve. In fact, the protagonist of the work becomes the light, which plays with the depressions and reliefs created on the canvas by the nails pressing down from the back of the work, giving us a three-dimensionality that would otherwise be non-existent.

Evidence of how much a creative act such as this - so apparently simple - carries with it a much deeper critical reflection can be found in the reaction of the previous generation of artists to the first works of this kind, as he himself describes (Scritti 1958-2012, Milan 2021, p. 101): "When we were young, the older people considered us heretics and iconoclasts, and they were right. They were wrong in demonising us because we did not use their same means and language. Now, if there is an activity (I do not call it a profession or a trade) in which one is allowed, indeed obliged, to freely invent the most appropriate techniques to convey one's language, this is precisely artistic activity."

Castellani outlined the characters (which later became distinctive of his language) at the end of the 1950s, shortly after he started his own artistic research into 'surfaces': the canvas is marked by a series of introflections and extroflections obtained by means of nails inserted into the frame that acts as a support. The distance to which the nails are driven in creates a rhythm, which is what changes from one work to the next, always obtaining new chiaroscuro effects from the impact of light on the surface. He conceives of the space on the canvas in a totally innovative way: monochromy and rhythmicity (which marks the distances between the nails) are his only compositional elements, necessary to achieve two contrasting and at the same time perfectly coexisting outcomes in his works; what he defines - in his 1960 essay Continuità e nuovo (Continuity and the New) - the 'concreteness of infinity' and the 'undergoing the conjugation of time'.

This language, so defined and radical, is clearly recognisable from his earliest works and is the constant throughout his artistic production, which remains extremely consistent with itself even some twenty years later, as in the case of the work presented here. A combination of factors that always appear the same, but in reality are always new and unique – light is what gives each of the canvases their own identity. In the case of this Superficie bianca, the perceived effect is stroboscopic, as if a mirror ball had been pressed onto a soft layer and left grooves as it passed through.