Guglielmo Castelli’s paintings and works on paper are characterised by fluid and relaxed human figures, whose bodies appear to merge with their surroundings. Though favouring neutral colour palettes, Castelli has also worked with more saturated colours and highlights.
Figure and Space
In the interiors, landscapes, public spaces, and ambiguous environments found in Castelli’s work, figures seem to float in the pools of colour that surround them. Pound of flash (2019), for example, depicts a woman seated in a chair, her head thrown backwards as if in sleep or deep contemplation; the wavy armature of her chair echoes the ripples created by the long brushstrokes of grey around it.
Che per fredda stagione foglia non perde, another painting completed in 2019, presents a similarly vague space. Framed by dark foliage at the top of the painting, with a fence in the distance, a human figure falls upside down into what would presumably be the ground—rendered here as a vague pool of yellow and washed-out red.
In other paintings, Castelli creates environments imbued with a sense of the theatrical. Three identifiable customers occupy the table in the painting All You Can Eat (2020), rendered as a ring of yellow that balances its mostly monochromatic surroundings. Most figures are seen in profile or from a bird’s-eye view save for a mermaid, whose reclining body on the table provides a diagonal anchor to the painting, and a figure in the background on the right side of the canvas, who echoes the shape of the mermaid’s head. Meanwhile, streams of smoke, rising from teapots and plates, add movement to the interior.
