A Lover's Discourse: Guglielmo Castelli

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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