Guglielmo Castelli

Although achieving different effects, a key common element within these two works by Castelli is the use of frames within his composition. ‘Topo Chico Motel’ creates a frame in which the entire painting exists within. The curved lines at the bottom of the composition separates the painting into two, and creates a platform and confined space in which the figure stands in. Creating frames within a compostion invites into the scene. creating a frame in which a painting exists in, allows for it to extend beyond or rather inwards in relation to the rectangular shaped the canvas it is confined to. The figure plays a large role in his works; the setting and environment mostly secondary. While the figure may be the main focal point of these works, the blur and fluidity of the form almost gets lost within everything that surrounds it. This integration can sometimes make the features of the figures indistinguishable, due to the intentional anatomical errors. Even as the specific features of may be lost, the emotion is captured by the desperate and violence within them. The idea that nothing is absolute but rather liquid, is something I always try to incorporate in my work. I believe the human condition is one of the most complex things, and what makes it so interesting of a theme to explore.

Interview with Arte Magazine:

The figures in your work have a very fluid, almost liquid quality to them. What does this signify?

Castelli: The memories are blurred, they are hardly clear… I’ve never trusted anyone who has a definite opinion about things, or black or white… Things are always liquid, becoming… Zygmunt Bauman describes this condition well. So my figures appear and then disappear immediately after, more than real bodies, I like to call them “attempts” ready ti change shape. They have deliberately wrong anatomical structure almost without bones, almost without skeletons, they fall, in free fall. What a wonderful thing to fall.

Looking at your work from over the years, it seems like a narrative unfolds between works. What are some of the main themes you’re interesting in and what ideas are you currently exploring in your work?

Castelli: As I said before, I have always been interested in the narrative aspect, not in the totality of a cycle of works, but more in the individual representations. After my residency at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, my interest focused on the management of spaces around human figures. Asking me what’s around? What happens outside the scene? When the lights go down, and everyone I gone… Still today I try to put lights and shadows on those small spaces that tell stories. When I design a work, when I make a sketch, I ask myself: “how can I increase the feeling og isolation and loneliness? What is the best posture for the sense of abandonment to be total?” Well, that’s what still interests me. Little by little I am trying to move these arguments to the pictorial act, but it will still take time. Painting silence is a difficult thing.

Should we read the descriptive yet illusive titles of your works as clues to what the pieces are about?

Castelli: Literature has accompanied me since I was a teenager, the power of words that turn into images. Often the work is simply a result of a title. A phrase from a book… Other times the title, voluntarily, “moves away” from what you see… But the narrative capacity of my painting insinuates itself as many times as in the titles, which gives the viewer an extra note, to ask: “and now? What happens? Maybe I looked in the wrong direction.”

https://artmazemag.com/what-a-wonderful-thing-to-fall-in-conversation-with-guglielmo-castelli/

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