Enrico Castellani (Castelmassa 1930)

Enrico Castellani was born in Castelmassa, province of Rovigo, in 1930. He moved to Brussels, where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts and earned a degree in architecture. In 1956 he was in Milan, where he devoted himself exclusively to painting, starting out with Informalist works in 1958 that were partly inspired by Wols, Fautrier and Tobey. From this already distinctive style full of gestural verve and futuristic élan, in 1959 he evolved towards a more ”object-based” form of painting which, by taking a number of currents already internalized by the Movimento d’Arte Concreta of Milan to their extreme, but remaining in tune with his early conceptual work, transformed his paintings into objects – objects that were therefore wholly extraneous to experience and to its suggestions; self-determined, self-reflexive.
Castellani later became close to Piero Manzoni, with whom he founded the review Azimuth and established an eponymous exhibition venue, which enjoyed a brief but intense life, becoming one of the leading international avant-garde centres. From that time onwards, applying rigorous discipline, he invented and practiced an art made from light elevations of the canvas from the surface level (perhaps in an allusion to Burri’s Gobbi, the revolutionary sweep of which he must have understood also thanks to Fontana). The result was an alternation of solids and voids, of pulsions and pauses which, repeated with modular assiduousness across the entire canvas surface, focused attention on the variations in perception provoked by the impact of the light.
While maintaining his identity apparently intact, since that time Castellani has greatly varied his artistic quest, and has evolved in different directions; for example by adopting a freer compositional system by comparison with the rigorously geometrical module that had so long inspired his artistic production. He has exhibited throughout Europe, America and Japan.