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Lot Essay
Executed in 1960, Superficie Bianca is one of the very first of Castellani's abstract relief paintings, created in the very year of the series' inception. With its subtle, regular plays of light across the variegated canvas, Superficie bianca forces the viewer to confront the fact that it is precisely that, a white surface. This intense and impermeable objecthood reflects the interests that the artist shared with his friend and fellow Azimut founder, Piero Manzoni, while also hinting at the influence that his works would later come to have on movements such as Minimalism, of which Donald Judd claimed that Castellani was the godfather.
Like Manzoni's Achromes, Superficie Bianca deliberately avoids even the hint of subject matter or content. The white surface is inscrutable, a tabula rasa before the viewer. And yet its surface, with its peaks and troughs, provides an intriguing and absorbing sight. The only subject is Superficie Bianca itself-- Castellani is forcing the viewer to contemplate and reconsider the qualities and potential of the components of painting, of the canvas and the stretcher and the nails. The fact that Castellani deliberately restricts himself to these traditional constituents of painting, which he then deftly rearranges, forces our reappraisal of a medium that appeared increasingly obsolete to the artists of the 1950s and 1960s. Figuration seemed redundant in the age of television and the nuclear bomb. Yet as a painter, Castellani found a Gordian Knot solution to the stalemate faced by the medium, salvaging his own vocation while paradoxically undermining his training-- Superficie Bianca breaks into the third dimension, into the world of sculpture and relief as well as that of Fontana's Spatialism. Retaining an expressly inscrutable and elegant yet Informel appearance, in Superficie Bianca Castellani provides painting with a future.
Like Manzoni's Achromes, Superficie Bianca deliberately avoids even the hint of subject matter or content. The white surface is inscrutable, a tabula rasa before the viewer. And yet its surface, with its peaks and troughs, provides an intriguing and absorbing sight. The only subject is Superficie Bianca itself-- Castellani is forcing the viewer to contemplate and reconsider the qualities and potential of the components of painting, of the canvas and the stretcher and the nails. The fact that Castellani deliberately restricts himself to these traditional constituents of painting, which he then deftly rearranges, forces our reappraisal of a medium that appeared increasingly obsolete to the artists of the 1950s and 1960s. Figuration seemed redundant in the age of television and the nuclear bomb. Yet as a painter, Castellani found a Gordian Knot solution to the stalemate faced by the medium, salvaging his own vocation while paradoxically undermining his training-- Superficie Bianca breaks into the third dimension, into the world of sculpture and relief as well as that of Fontana's Spatialism. Retaining an expressly inscrutable and elegant yet Informel appearance, in Superficie Bianca Castellani provides painting with a future.