(Castelmassa, Rovigo 1930–2017 Viterbo)
Untitled (Superficie bianca), 1963, signed and dated Castellani 1963 on the reverse, acrylic on shaped canvas, 40 x 50 cm

This work is registered in the Archivio Fondazione Castellani, Milan and is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity.
This work will be included in the forthcoming Vol. III of the Catalogue Raisonné of Enrico Castellani, being currently compiled (planned for 2021)

Provenance:
Galerie Wulfengasse 14, Klagenfurt
Heiderose Hildebrand, Vienna - gift from the artist

Exhibited:
Klagenfurt, Galerie Wulfengasse 14, 3 – 29 August 1964

Illustrated in:
More than Zero. Hans Bischoffshausen and Galerie Hildebrand, 20 October 2015,
p. 82 (Exhibition 1964)

Like Manzoni, Bonalumi and Scheggi, Enrico Castellani was one of the protagonists of the lively artistic milieu in Milan during the 1960s. A forerunner of Minimalism in Germano Celant’s words, the artist, who was born in Castelmassa in 1930 and settled in Milan in 1953 after studying sculpture and architecture, must be regarded as one of the most innovative artists after the war, as the creator of a unique, recognisable language.

Like Lucio Fontana and the other representatives of object art, Castellani aspires to go beyond painting and the illusory image that traditionally results from it, aiming, rather, to create ‘self-representing’ objects that are ‘meaningful’ in themselves.

After the short yet significant experience of Azimuth (1959), the artist faithfully devoted himself to a personal, revolutionary quest based on the patient, constant repetition of one and the same gesture that is at once identical and extremely new. In 1959 Castellani gave up his informal research and began to deform the support of the canvas, thus relating the latter to space and making it perceptible by means of ‘extroflexions’, a technique he would employ without variations from that time onwards.

To the experiments of those early years can be also ascribed the present work, Superficie bianca, a historical work from 1963, a canvas in relief, white.

The canvas is characterized by a very distinct texture with a perfectly legible weave, its inner rhythm varies in connection with the nails which, in a perfect balance of contrasting forces, create an elegant alternating pattern of empty and full spaces, of light and shade.
The choice of using white accentuates the objectivity and the immateriality of the work.
With a language that is both minimalist and laden with physical tension, the artist rid himself of all descriptive, sentimental metaphors, thus attaining a complete impersonality of the object in which there is nothing to interpret and nothing to see, except for what that object is.