Superficie alluminio

“I believe it is illegitimate and presumptuous to want to deform space in a definitive and irreversible way, with the presumption, moreover, of wanting to have an impact on reality: at best, it is a useless operation. At most, it is permissible to structure it in such a way as to make it perceptible and sensorially accessible; space, after all, concerns and troubles us insofar as it contains us.”

Taken from the catalogue of the exhibition Lo spazio dell'immagine (The Space of the Image), 1967, these words by Enrico Castellani clearly highlight the main issue around which the artist’s entire body of work has always revolved.
Starting in 1959, Castellani created predominantly monochrome relief surfaces, defined by Carla Lonzi as “places of possible contemplation” and described by Castellani himself as “as immaterial as possible, shaped with double curvature and repeated elements”—a succession of protrusions and recesses that alter the classic tension of the canvas, within which full and empty, concave and convex, light and shadow, positive and negative converse, attract, repel, and coexist.
In doing so, he initiated a working method, a true system, effective and recognizable even in the work Superficie alluminio, executed in 2001, exhibited in Bergamo at the Galleria Fumagalli that same year, and later on the occasion of the exhibition Obsession, held in Milan in 2003.