Category: Clothes Paintings

‘I approach the canvas as if it were a stage, or a scene,’ artist Guglielmo Castelli explains during our Zoom conversation from his studio in Turin. Speaking at the beginning of March 2024, he tells me that he has just finished the paintings for his Venice exhibition ‘Improving Songs for Anxious Children’, curated by Milovan Farronato at the Palazzetto Tito, and opening to coincide with the Venice Biennale 2024. 

Bringing together a series of paintings, maquettes, textiles and knitted sculptures, the show explores childhood as the genesis of discovery – of the body, of relationships, of death and of the dance between success and failure. Inside Castelli’s canvases, figures bend and contort in ways that defy anatomy, and are set against familiar domestic backdrops. The works portray a metaphysical realm, one that explores ideas of fragility and violence, carelessness and attentiveness, and morality and corruption.

castelli-s-39-improving-songs-for-anxious-children-39-3″Guglielmo Castelli’s ‘Improving Songs for Anxious Children’

‘The idea of fragility, in terms of the other side of violence, is like a knife that you cut and open within yourself…’ Evoking a sense of inner turmoil and fragmentation, Castelli’s works are as much inhabited as they are inhabiting: some works incorporate collaged items of clothing, hinting at a past presence. In Of aggression and possession, a paper cut-out house is collaged to cover the crotch of an empty pair of shorts, with figures climbing inside and up the legs. The clothing, while contingent, evokes a sense of a hollowed corporeality. Marcel Duchamp’s term infra-mince (defined as traces of previous existence) is useful here, prompting viewers to contemplate beyond its surface, beyond fragile boundaries.