Enrico Castellani valuation

Enrico Castellani was born at Castelmassa in the Veneto in 1930 and trained in Belgium, studying painting and sculpture in Brussels before returning to Milan at the end of the 1950s. With Piero Manzoni he founded the Azimut gallery and the journal Azimuth in 1959, the centre of a short-lived Milanese avant-garde that wanted to be finished with gesture and composition altogether. The answer he arrived at was the Superficie: a monochrome canvas stretched over a grid of nails and counter-supports so that the surface is pushed forward and drawn back in a regular rhythm, and the picture is made by light falling across it rather than by anything applied to it. He kept to that structure for fifty years and was awarded the Praemium Imperiale in 2010. He died in 2017.

The Superfici are the market, most often in white but also in red, blue, gold and silver, and in formats from small panels to room-sized works. Condition governs everything, because there is nowhere for damage to hide: a dent between two points, an abrasion, a crease from bad transit or a yellowed white cannot be made good without remaking the surface. These should be examined in raking light rather than flat light. The Archivio Enrico Castellani in Milan is the authority and registers works, and its certificate is the document to have; a monochrome surface is also, for obvious reasons, widely imitated.