with Galleria dell'Ariete, Milan,

with Galleria del Cortile, Rome,

Private Collection.

In 1959, together with Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani founded the art gallery Azimut and a magazine called Azimuth. Associated with the artistic groups ZERO and NUL, between December 1959 and July 1960, Galleria Azimut presented thirteen exhibitions, including Castellani’s first solo exhibition, and the important group show La nuova concezione artistica (The New Artistic Conception). Castellani dedicated himself to experimenting with different methods, using nails under a stretched-out canvas to form a sort of dance between light, angles and shadows; a technique that would later become his signature style. Castellani and Manzoni’s joint projects in 1959–60 established Milan as an important centre of activity for ZERO, a rapidly expanding international network of artists committed to redefining art and engaging light, space, time and movement. From 1963 to 1970 Castellani exhibited at a number of different galleries throughout Europe. It was also between these years that surface poetry began to give way to the subject, with Castellani’s attention changing its focus to study more on the formal articulations of the surface with his canvases becoming shaped, angular, diptychs and triptychs. In 1966 he won the Gollin prize at the Venice Biennale.

This hexagonal canvas, realised by Castellani in 1970, is a rare work (there are but two or three examples in this geometric format in existence), and moreover presents a visually compelling surface. The appearance of the work shifts and changes in an almost infinite range of possibilities depending upon the angle at which it is viewed together with the light, and what emerges is a universe in which the viewer might lose themselves, sharing in the artist's obsession with impressing rhythm upon the canvas. The lower part of the canvas, not by chance, appears free from the "dotting" that punctuates the upper surface, creating myriad further visual effects, from the acceleration of rhythms as they gravitate into the centre and out to the edges, the outer limits of the surface. A play of light and dark unfolds, finding an interval in the space devoid of nails, just as in a musical score that demands a lengthy pause. Even without direct light, Castellani's canvases reveal their universe in full, calmer, less rich in contrasts, but equally vitalised by the movement of the nails. A place in which to project one's own thoughts or, simply, to allow the viewer to remain in the uncertainty of being able to discover all the rhythmic solutions that the canvas offers.