Enrico Castellani and the 1972-1973 experiments: grid, decentralisation and transparency in Lavagna and Topologema

Abstract

The aim of the article is to investigate some works produced by Enrico Castellani in the early 1970s. In the light of the theoretical elaborations conceived by Castellani in the 1960s and during the following decades, the article aims to reread in particular two types of formal articulation executed between 1972 and 1973, that is Lavagna and the Topologema series, in which it seems possible to trace the genesis of an unprecedented speculative need by the author. Without ever neglecting Castellani's ‘classic’ work, relating to his famous monochrome Superfici sensitised by a punctuation of nails, and indeed always developing the discourse through the necessary reference to the canonical work, the artist's explorations carried out almost in the same months on canvas and slate manifest an investigation of the formal opportunities provided by the constituent elements of painting. Point, line and surface are the foundation of the reflection started by Castellani already at the end of the 1950s, the basis to which are now added the coordinates of the grid, decentralisation and transparency, values that in the 1970s the artist seems to want to recode within a new technical-theoretical research. Reaching as far as the observation of the plastic outcome of this trend through a sculpture from 2015, the aim of the article is to record these experiments precisely as processes of testing and verifying the artist's primary idea, comparing his writings with the texts of international critics - such as Alloway and Krauss - who simultaneously, in the United States, identify similar paths.