Enrico Castellani was born in Castelmassa, in the province of Rovigo, on 4th August 1930. He was schooled in Novara and Milan and in 1952 moved to Brussels, Belgium, where he attended courses in painting and sculpture at the Acadamie des Beaux Arts for about a year. In 1956 he obtained a degree in Architecture at Ecole Nationale Superieure de la Cambre.
After graduating, he returned to Milan to work at the architecture studio of Franco Buzzi, with whom Castellani collaborated until 1963. It was at the studio that Castellani launched his first artistic experiments. In Pino Pom’s bar he met Piero Manzoni, who became a very close friend, while at Galleria Ariete he came into contact with Lucio Fontana, whose work he already admired, and the typographer and printer Antonio Maschera. Castellani’s work was featured for the first time in collective art shows in Milan, at Galleria Pater and Galleria del Prisma.
In 1959 he completed his first relief paintings.
With Manzoni, who had established relationships with artists throughout Europe, Castellani took part in the activities of the group of German artists known as Zero, and its Dutch equivalent, Nul. They also met the members of Group de Recherche d’Art Visual. In order to show their work and that of other artists inspired by similar impulses, Castellani and Manzoni co-founded Galleria Azimut (located at via Clerici no. 12 in Milan, in a space loaned by Isa Buzzi) and launched the journal 'Azimuth'. The publication’s first issue, released in December, featured several contributions and a diverse set of images of works of art, by artists selected by the founders. The second issue of 'Azimuth' was published in January 1960, on the occasion of the exhibit 'The New Artistic Conception' - which displayed works by Breier, Castellani, Holweck, Klein, Mack, Manzoni and Mavignier - and opened with an essay by Castellani entitled 'Continuity and the New'.
Castellani showed at Galleria Azimut in 1960, and three of his relief paintings were featured at the 'Monochrome Malerei' show at Leverkusen’s Stadtisches Museum.
In 1961, the third issue of the 'Zero' journal published Castellani’s seminal essay entitled 'Totality in today’s art', written in 1958. With Manzoni, Castellani exhibited works in Rome at Plinio De Martiis' Galleria la Tartaruga; again with Manzoni, in 1962 he was featured at Galerie Aujourd’hui in Brussels and participated in the Nul review at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum.
In 1963, Castellani was given a solo show at Beatrice Monti’s Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan. In subsequent years, the number of shows featuring his work soared, with many exhibits held in Italy and abroad. In 1964 three works by Castellani were included in the Venice Biennale, in a room that also accommodated works by Getulio Alviani and Enzo Mari. In the same year, Castellani participated in the 'Guggenheim International Award' in New York. In 1965 one of his large 'Superficie bianca' ('white surface') canvasses was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of the international art show 'The Responsive Eye'. Works by Castellani were chosen to represent Italy at the Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna in Sao Paulo, Brazil and 'Trigon 65', Burggarten/Palmenhaus, in Graz, Austria. In 1966 Castellani had a dedicated room at the Venice Biennale (Photo 3) where he received the 'Premio Gollin', an award for painters under forty years of age. He lived for some time in the United States, completing a number of works that were later exhibited in his first solo show in New York, at Betty Parsons Gallery.
In 1967 Castellani was invited to build an installation for the art show 'Lo spazio dell’immagine' ('the space of images') in Palazzo Trinci at Foligno. This led to the creation of 'Ambiente bianco' ('white habitat'), a container designed to be experientially accessible, organized in a structure that allowed the viewer to walk through it and that could be grasped by the senses. Following the show the installation was destroyed, with the exception of a few relief panels.
In May 1968, against a background of sweeping unrest, Galleria la Tartaruga in Rome presented, over the course of one month, on the occasion of 'Teatro del mostre', daily shows featuring works by some of the best known Italian artists - Angeli, Boetti, Calzolari, Ceroli, Mauri and Paolini, among many others. These included Castellani’s 'Il muro del tempo', ('wall of time') a piece consisting of eight metronomes placed on a base, each one marking time until it exhausted its charge, a signal of the inevitable end of the show (the work of art, however, lived on, as it was often shown again in subsequent years).
In 1968 Castellani was also among the leaders of protests at the Milan Triennale and the Venice Biennale. With Enzo Mari, Castellani co-wrote 'Un rifiuto possibile' ('a refusal that is possible', published in 1969 in Almanacco Letterario Bompiani, Milan), an opinion piece in which the authors advocate vigorously for the autonomy of art and artists from commercial interests. Castellani and Mari refused to take part in group shows which in their view represented 'a justification for shunning responsibility', and they instead favored 'solo shows in which we will take full responsibility, since we are committed to speaking out every time against the kinds of compromises and the boundaries that stand between research and production.'
In 1970, for another solo show in the space of La Tartaruga, alongside some relief paintings Castellani exhibited 'Spartito' ('score'), which he described as 'accumulated, overlapping sheets of paper that are initially bound and then become stacked in the middle. That is, a reiteration of the movement which ultimately produces a shape, an aesthetic object, because it results in a curve.' Around the end of the year Castellani created 'Spazio ambiente', a new version of 'Ambiente bianco', to be shown alongside two large white relief paintings and 'Spartito' at the show 'Vitalita del negativo nell’arte italiana 1960/70' ('vitality of the negative in Italian art, 1960-1970') at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.
Following a period of forced exile in Switzerland, in 1973 Castellani returned to Italy and settled in Celleno, a small hamlet in the province of Viterbo.
Since then, Castellani has continued to play by his own rules. Day after day, he gives life to new relief paintings that make room for 'infinite encounters, agonizing waits, tautological commensurations, existential suffering and utopian substantiations', as he remains firmly anchored in the validity and timeliness of his inventive spirit.
Text: Federico Sardella
