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Harsha Agarwal

About Enrico Castellani: Architecture and Zero Movement

“The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.”    

– Jerzy Kosinski


The life form of creating new changes in one’s perspective of an object, a person or its surrounding is formed via two common practices which we do intentionally or just as an act of a process that remains in some part of our mind; and these two processes involve either getting bored of your surrounding – which would want you to change something about it or getting “inspired” by an idea revolving in a minute part of your subconscious mind that gets instigated when you see something that brings that latent thought to life.


Spazio Ambiente under Ambiente Bianco for the exhibition 'La Spazio dell Immagine' – Enrico Castellani

In architecture, every object is named; you could even say that architecture starts in language. To be structured and made by the human psyche and for issues of wellbeing and characterized work everything is characterized inside a semantic framework. After all architecture defines what it stands for – developing and building. Minimalism had started as an art form originally where simple geometric patterns were incorporated with monotones. Minimalism is also interpreted as diffused boundaries or smudged borders, which means that sometimes the artist or the architect blur the gap between two objects to create a unifying effect [1]. Innovation could be depicted as one of the most idealistic styles in structural history, drawing from ideas of the ideal world, advancement, and the reimagination of how people would live, work, and connect.



Enrico Castellani was an Italian painter and, an architect who is known for mastering the art of light – a symbol where his paintings were as real as a sculpture, their surfaces, particularly those Castellani painted white, have been compared to lunar landscapes. He produced a searching body of work that reveals the artist’s ability to transform canvases into original terrains. Castellani influenced several artists and movements who came after him, perhaps most notably minimalism and hence was called the “Father of Minimalism” and a prominent member of ZERO Movement or ZERO avant-garde group. 


ZERO Group


The name refers to the countdown for a rocket launch and according to the group is meant to evoke ‘a zone of silence [out of which develops] a new beginning’. The concept of the ZERO Movement was simple- a collaboration of work materials, incorporating matter for the existence of the state of visual display of any object- space and light. For the artists of the Zero Group, key areas of exploration were colour (mostly monochrome), light, motion, space and seriality. The artists favoured monochrome colours for various reasons: for one thing, it was a departure from the expressionistic and abstract works by post-war movements like Art Informel. Secondly, they used colour to explore light, emphasising the surfaces, highlights and shadows of works. Key areas of artistic exploration included colour (almost always monochrome), light, motion, space, and seriality. The light was explored through. It turned out to be one of the most popular art reforms because it was effectively contributing against the conceptual trend of colours and prints and effective understanding on how minor adjustments to the method of light and layers could elevate one’s personal opinion on the display of a room. It also boomed as most of the exhibitions were organised by the artists themselves. But after a few years, this movement saw its downfall due to the lack of supporting scriptures and monetary benefits. Hence The ZERO artists continued to work independently after the group’s actively collaborative period ended in 1966 providing the foundation and sparking the concept of minimalism.


References

[1]  Obendorf H 2009 Minimalism: designing simplicity (Dordrecht: Springer)


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