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Lot Essay
A large white square monochrome canvas whose surface is, as its title suggests, extended spatially in a sequence of four contrasting directions, Quadropolare is a major example of Enrico Castellani's Superfici. Executed in 1971, Quadropolare is nearly identical in both format and scale to the centrepiece of a complete spatial environment, Spazio Ambiente, that Castellani had made one year earlier in 1970 in which the walls of a room had been transformed into a series of playfully distortive spatial surfaces.
Castellani's Superfici (surfaces) were the elegant solution and material response to the artist's call, first voiced in the magazine Azimuth that he founded in Milan with Piero Manzoni in 1959, for an elemental art based solely on the concepts of space, light and time. In a move similar to the autonomous technique applied in Manzoni's Achromes, where blank canvases dipped in Kaolin came to form self-defining entities wholly independent from the artist, but asserting their own materiality and existential presence, Castellani developed an equally authorless and arbitrary approach in the creation of his Superfici.
Following his mentor Lucio Fontana's radical break with tradition, by operating on the space around the picture, instead of adding to its surface, Castellani evolved a technique of spatially distorting the empty monochrome surface of the painting by stretching it over a systematically prepared relief background of nails. These, indented into the rear of the canvas transformed its two dimensional surface into an undulating arena of play between, light and shade, and between positive and negative depth. Echoing some of the developments of the Group Zero in Dusseldorf, with whom Castellani and Manzoni were also in contact, the geometric regularity of this patterning also added to the impression of the work as a holistic entirety - as both a microcosm and a macrocosm - and a model of our concept of both infinity and the void.
This sense of infinity was intrinsic to Castellani's use of monochrome surfaces which he asserted had to be as 'immaterial as possible'. Through this conjunction of the heavy materiality of the back and the ultimate sense of 'immateriality' expressed by the whole work - a two dimensional surface now transformed into a three-dimensional object - became a harmonious spatial unit.
Castellani's Superfici (surfaces) were the elegant solution and material response to the artist's call, first voiced in the magazine Azimuth that he founded in Milan with Piero Manzoni in 1959, for an elemental art based solely on the concepts of space, light and time. In a move similar to the autonomous technique applied in Manzoni's Achromes, where blank canvases dipped in Kaolin came to form self-defining entities wholly independent from the artist, but asserting their own materiality and existential presence, Castellani developed an equally authorless and arbitrary approach in the creation of his Superfici.
Following his mentor Lucio Fontana's radical break with tradition, by operating on the space around the picture, instead of adding to its surface, Castellani evolved a technique of spatially distorting the empty monochrome surface of the painting by stretching it over a systematically prepared relief background of nails. These, indented into the rear of the canvas transformed its two dimensional surface into an undulating arena of play between, light and shade, and between positive and negative depth. Echoing some of the developments of the Group Zero in Dusseldorf, with whom Castellani and Manzoni were also in contact, the geometric regularity of this patterning also added to the impression of the work as a holistic entirety - as both a microcosm and a macrocosm - and a model of our concept of both infinity and the void.
This sense of infinity was intrinsic to Castellani's use of monochrome surfaces which he asserted had to be as 'immaterial as possible'. Through this conjunction of the heavy materiality of the back and the ultimate sense of 'immateriality' expressed by the whole work - a two dimensional surface now transformed into a three-dimensional object - became a harmonious spatial unit.