Exhibition Guide
GUGLIELMO CASTELLI
with works by Simone Leigh, chosen by Castelli
October 20–December 10, 2023
Aspen Art Museum
A Lover’s Discourse
October 20–December 10, 2023
Guglielmo Castelli with works by Simone Leigh, chosen by Castelli
Love in the Time of Contamination Laura McLean-Ferris
Never before have we been in such a state of entanglement. We are caught up in the weeds, sinking in the silt, we are in each other’s cells, we are contaminated. The world inundates us, engulfs us, fills our pores and lungs, like a temperature, like air. Everywhere we turn there is oil in the water. Is this feeling an absorption within our own environment? A dissolution? Could this be a kind of love? Is there love in it?
We are in a scene like a closed set: a tight, walled garden, tucked behind a gray stone house with no windows. Overhead the lilac skies are darkening, and shadows are creeping towards us down the mountains on the horizon. The garden is a sickly green color with a spiraling structure that threatens to suck the garden underground. It is studded with tiny flowers and plants, and edged by trees with fastidious topiary. It might be a circular prison or a toxic Eden, inhabited by three figures instead of the traditional Biblical pair, all of indeterminate gender. Each figure wears prim little pointed shoes and dainty socks that seem too small—a regular costume choice for Castelli’s characters. It is as though they have been forced to squeeze their feet into them, forcing their bodies to bloom excessively from the ankles upwards, as though in rebellion. They appear to be formed from the same substance and palette as the garden. This is all they have, the closed circuit, complete entanglement. Their only way out of their trap is to use what is already there. One figure seems to be entering the garden from the house, the other exiting. In the center, a third, central figure stands, with a face pinched in concentration and arms raised above their head as though pulling something with invisible cords. Around their waist is a spinning hula hoop lit with flames, from which they seem to be conjuring a green ectoplasmic ball of magic, which shimmers with white cellular forms and is speckled with brown material. Is there an eye inside it? It looks like the possibility of a protean, new world, drawn from the raw ingredients of the polluted substance that they inhabit: from oil, rot, and mold.
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Barthes writes of the desire of the lover to be engulfed, a desire for annihilation that can occur in either despair or fulfillment: “I am dissolved, not dismembered; I fall, I flow, I felt. Such thoughts— grazed, touched, tested (the way you test the water with your foot)—can recur. This is exactly what gentleness is.” 1 A strange gentleness, this dabbling with the abyss, to dip one’s toe into the water and submit to dissolution.
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The grounds of Guglielmo Castelli’s paintings can barely be called grounds. They are more like fluids: relative substances of the flower-strewn river where Ophelia floats to her death in the painting by John Everett Millais, or of the scintillating waters in Pierre Bonnard’s bathtubs. The eye swims, accompanied by all manner of materials and elements: daisies, lace, streaks of fat, soil, tongues, patterned carpets, and twinkling lights. This substance has an amniotic quality that allows figures to emerge from it as though they were grown and nourished there, suspended in and shaped by their liquid home.
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Castelli once injured his leg and had cause to take medication that would dilute his blood. It made him wonder if he could do the same for his paintings.
“Boneless,” Castelli has called the figures in his paintings, adding that they are also survivors. 2
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Barthes: “I dilute myself, I swoon in order to escape that density, that clogging which makes me into a responsible subject.” 3
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A second scene has the color of tobacco, stained wood, and amber light. Now, three figures are together inside a vitrine, resembling a fin di siècle store display, a fish tank, or a museum diorama. The three are so close to one another now, that the boundaries between the bodies are blurred, their hips and buttocks and legs flow into one another in a kind of dance. There is also a flow of forms like genitals, fluids, organs, not belonging to any individual but all of them, as one. They have succumbed to complete and total co-dependency, co-embodiment, ecstasy. Is this the paradise that they built for themselves, from their Edenic prison? Is this a love like fusion, a soft annihilation, a euphoria? But this too, cannot last. The disappearance of the self into others is the lover’s fantasy. For these boneless bodies, like liquid dolls, have more recombining and reforming to do, and they belong to their environment as much as to one another. In the foreground of the scene an eerie hand with a sharp knife approaches, which seems destined to cut the lovers apart. But they are survivors. They will not be lost in each other forever, will not be annihilated, but will split and swim. To continue to constitute new worlds in which to survive, from the old one. That is all we have.
Notes
1. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse (London, Vintage, 2018), p.10. Originally published 1977, French. Translation by Richard Howard, Copyright Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. 1978 2. In conversation with the author, 2023 3. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse , p. 12
Aspen Art Museum
June 22–January 14, 2024 A Lover’s Discourse
Guglielmo Castelli Chase Hall Ulala Imai Stanislava Kovalcikova Zeinab Saleh Issy Wood
A Lover’s Discourse is a new series of artist-led presentations introducing unexpected dialogues between artworks from different generations. Each exhibition juxtaposes recent works by an early-career artist with their choice of a companion piece from a private collection in Aspen. Artist selections range from historical to contemporary pieces, and span figurative and abstract painting, sculpture, video, works on paper, and sound.
October 20–December 10, 2023
Leigh’s sculptures follow forms traditionally associated with African art and methods of craft. Their eyes are erased and at times their whole face vanishes into a void. Brought in conversation for the first time in the context of A Lover’s Discourse , Castelli and Leigh’s works emerge from different trajectories of research and making, and narrate embodied experiences through the evocation of the human figure in their works.
Guglielmo Castelli with works by Simone Leigh, chosen by Castelli
The fourth presentation of A Lover’s Discourse features two new paintings by artist Guglielmo Castelli (b. 1987, Turin). After a period of research into local collections in Aspen, with a focus on sculptural works, Castelli selected three sculptures of heads by Simone Leigh to be shown in dialogue with his canvases. Based in a city whose rich artistic history contains the lives of Carol Rama and Carlo Mollino to the groundbreaking Arte Povera movement, Castelli belongs to a younger generation of Italian artists who are distinctively engaging with these inherited artistic narratives in an effort to forge new paths that shift them forward. Prior to becoming a painter, the artist trained as a set designer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin and worked as a set and costume designer for theatre and cinema—a past life that breathes through his current paintings, populated by fluid, at times slippery, bodies in dramatic arrangements. Language and literature continue to be important anchor points for the artist in the construction of worlds, characters, and spatial narratives that articulate and unfold through his canvases. The juxtaposition of Castelli’s canvases— sharp intentions (2023) and A house is not a home (2023)—with Simone Leigh’s sculptures No Face (Cobalt) (2016), No Face (Bronze) (2018), and The Village Series #11 (2019) accentuates the sense of performativity and personhood in the works of both artists while a teetering balance between figuration and abstraction envelops the room. Presented as a trio on a central plinth, and realized each in a different material including porcelain, terracotta, bronze, and stoneware,
List of works:
Guglielmo Castelli sharp intentions , 2023
oil on canvas 59 × 47 1/4 in Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York Guglielmo Castelli A house is not a home , 2023 oil on canvas 75 5/8 × 94 1/2 in Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York
Simone Leigh No Face (Cobalt) , 2016 Porcelain, cobalt, terracotta, India ink 22.5 × 7.5 × 8.5 in Collection of Melony and Adam Lewis
Simone Leigh No Face (Bronze) , 2018 Bronze
17.5 × 7 × 6 in Edition 7 of 10 Collection of Melony and Adam Lewis Simone Leigh The Village Series #11 , 2019 Stoneware 22.5 × 8 × 9 in Collection of Melony and Adam Lewis
Guglielmo Castelli (b. 1987) lives and works in Turin. Recent solo shows include Demonios Familiares , Mendes Wood DM New York, USA and The Cabin LA Presents: A Curated Flashback , Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX, USA (both 2023); A knife with no blade, missing its handle / ΕΝΑ ΜΑΧΑΙΡΙ ΧΩΡΙΣ ΛΕΠΙΔΑ, ΠΟΥ ΤΟΥ ΛΕΙΠΕΙ Η ΛΑΒΗ , RODEO London-Piraeus (2022); Calm act in closed room , Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2021); Ornate Impotence, The Cabin, Los Angeles (2020), Sia inteso come tutto ciò che non pesa, Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza (2019), Goodmorning Bambino, Künstlerhaus
Bethanien, Berlin (2018). Selected group exhibitions include Andrew Kreps, New York (2021); Galerie Rolando Anselmi, Rome (2020), Atina (2020), Berlin, 2019. His work was featured in several institutional exhibitions and biennials including Pittura Italiana Oggi, Triennale Milano, Milan (2023); mutanti, sotto un cielo che implode , OGR Torino, Turin (2023); Diario Notturno, Maxxi L’Aquila, L’Aquila (2023); Expressioni at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea , Rivoli (2022); the 17a Quadriennale di Roma (2020); Stasi Frenetica , GAM , Turin (2020); the Biennale Internazionale d’Art Contemporain
de Melle (2018); Challenging Beauty, Parkview Museum , Singapore (2018); Recto/ Verso 2 , Foundation Louis Vuitton , Paris (2018); Intriguing Uncertainties , Museum of Contemporary Art of Saint-Étienne (2016); and Lo sguardo delle gallerie sulla grande arte italiana , Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna (2016). His forthcoming exhibitions include a presentation at the Villa Medici (forthcoming 2024) and Improving songs for anxious children, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice (forthcoming 2024). In 2017, he was mentioned in the “30 Under 30, Europe” list by Forbes Magazine .
ABOUT THE ASPEN ART MUSEUM
Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1979, the Aspen Art Museum is a thriving and globally engaged non-collecting contemporary art museum. Following the 2014 opening of the museum’s facility designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Shigeru Ban, the AAM enjoys increased attendance, renewed civic interaction, and international media attention. In July 2017, the AAM was one of ten institutions to receive the United States’ National Medal for Museum and Library Services for its educational outreach to rural communities in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley and its fostering of learning partnerships with civic and cultural partners within a 100-mile radius of the museum’s Aspen location.
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aspenartmuseum.org (970) 925-8050
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A Lover’s Discourse is curated by AAM Curator at Large Stella Bottai. AAM exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Additional support is provided by the AAM National Council.
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