Superficie bianca

Enrico Castellani's minimalist and severe relief surfaces rank along with the Buchi (Holes) and Attese (Expectations) paintings of Lucio Fontana and the Achromes of Piero Manzoni as some of the most innovative, pioneering and iconoclastic developments in post-War European art. Superficie bianca ('White Surface') of 1964 contains many elements which are common to much of Castellani's oeuvre. These elements centre around the artist's eschewing of individualism, an aesthetic that allows him to create a self-sufficient work of art devoid of any reference to its art-historical context or creator, to be interpreted by the viewer solely in its own right. In Superficie bianca, Castellani uses a repeated pattern on a single colour (what he referred to as a 'non-colour') and a blanket title that was applied to a whole series of works from throughout his career. Each of these elements prevents the viewer gleaning anything from the picture in terms of the artist's decision-making process. Castellani made Superficie bianca by hammering rows of nails into wooden strips then fixing these strips to the reverse of his canvases so that each nail permanently creates a protrusion on the front surface. The peaks and troughs that result wreak havoc with the presumption that a canvas should be flat and two-dimensional. The dimpled surface plays tricks of light and shadow that in traditional figurative painting remained the domain of the artist's painterly abilities to render the different effects of sunlight and shade. The spaces between the nails, and indeed between the strips of wood and their relative angles, affect the pattern produced on the surface of each picture. All of these patterns are made using mathematical rhythms. The rigidity of Superficie bianca's materials, its colourless tone and the geometrical precision involved, lend it an air of manufacture that is deliberately employed to remove any hint of artistic process or inspiration.
In creating Superficie bianca, Castellani purposefully used only materials found in traditional painting on canvas. Although his work is devoid of many of the elements commonly found in painting such as illusions of space and light or personal expression, it cannot be categorized as anything but painting. Castellani, like his contemporaries Fontana and Manzoni, deliberately uses the traditional tools of painting as a forum for his iconoclastic artistic statements, disrupting both the canvas itself and the viewer's expectations and challenging conventional beliefs about the boundaries of painting.