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The Light of Inspiration in Leonardo Castellani's Paintings

Floriano De Santi

 III. Magic realism

 After having interpreted with deep conviction the glittering 'score' of futurism, young Castellani would then have to put his post-impressionist patrimony to good use. Paradoxically, in the oil paintings Un giardino a Cesena (A garden in Cesena) of 1917 and in the 1920 Ritratto della madre (Portrait of mother), he looked to the fauvists, rather than the cubists. The fauvists had been the first to discover that color is not an additive with which to cover, glaze, or enliven a space already created with lines, with the mechanism of perspective of volumes, or by means of chiaroscuro, but rather that color itself can be placed in a special situation, that is, it can create space in a direct relationship.

Castellani always admired matisse more than Picasso; the real relationship, although it is not immediately apparent, is with matisse then, from the very beginning, and with his new total style painting. While matisse however, put a radiant whirl of pure colors into motion, and his light is dazzling, violent and blaring, Castellani approaches — almost timidly, in a subdued manner - tonal colors in which the light is suffused, slow, mysterious. One doesn't know where it comes from, if not from a sunken spring at the extreme roots of the matter and appearing, even and dimmed, after having passed through dark depths.

Having begun from that Erfindung, from the invention of matisse cut to the measure of his own spiritual needs, Castellani began his infinite series of tone variations. It will nevertheless be miraculous to see the way in which the medium is alive in masterpieces like Canale della Giudecca (The Giudecca canal) of 1927 and Venezia, San Vidal (San Vidal, Venice) of the following year; how it absorbs and emits light; how the color subtly vibrates; how there is in the agreement of the chromatic scale a mysterious 'handing down' of the senses, and a delicate vibration of the light is propagated, and «the limits within which things become other things- advance solemnly. (I do not mean that they are ambiguous, but rather that their reality becomes, with a quick burst, magical, and it is that clarity of their characterization which in fact assists in the lyric metamorphoses [i]. The hues come alive working with one another, responding to each other from a distance, changing at these matching's, creating thus the unity of the work, its atmosphere and the emotional space that in this Venetian season is similar to that of works by Virgilio Guidi.

While in all of Europe painting 'docked' on the 'banks' of a reconstructive classicism of the form that seemed to want to bring salvation and other to chaotic and perilous times, Castellani, together with a few others, took the longest steps possible in the opposite direction. These years were, in Italy, those of reviews such as «Valori Plastici-, and then the «Ronda»; the «Novecento» was being readied for printing, and Fascism was being born. And all of these facts (among which the closest of connections is that which usually does not appear) were forming a cultural Stimmung that, although finding its parallel and perhaps its justification in European culture, remained however surpassed by it in terms of moral commitment and stylistic result. Certain undertakings which were able to assert a sort of authenticity by virtue of their origin or 'birthright', such as «Strapaese», were likewise spoilt by mussolini's «call to order», by the fear of causing upheaval.

For Castellani, too, then, began a short season of paintings which could be described as «neoclassical», or better yet, as of a sort of «magic realism», in which every object is immobile in an equilibrium so very precarious that a puff of air would be enough to interrupt it. In his Autoritratto (Self-portrait) of 1925 and in the 1927 Ritratto di bambina (Portrait of a Young Girl) there is not only the purity of the 'old school' of Italian painting, the solid substance of an art form brought to its most absolute definition (as has obviously been said before) but which was also, at times, penetrated by the interstices of a space that seemed to contain it perfectly, the light and restless air of a magical atmosphere. In these and other works (among which it may be helpful to recall Ritratto del padre (Portrait of Father) of 1926 and Le stiratrici (The Ironers) of 1928, exhibited at the 27th Biennal Exhibition of modern Art in Venice) [ii], the lines pass through the gemlike and 'mental' color separating it in the figures while, on the contrary, it is continuous in the polychromatic tension of the background.

Does one find, then, a separating of the silhouettes, or rather, that they are prevented from vibrating in a single tension, in a metaphysical magnetic field, in total plastic obedience to the detached 'mishap? It is here that the greatest work transpires, the intrinsic labor of a Castellani who was searching for his own definitive ubi consistam. Yes, this is a --magic realism-, up to the serenely classical stylistic . method [iii] used in Ritratto di famiglia (Family Portrait) of 1926, in the Tuscan tactile tradition up to the master Piero, but also, I would say the lesson of Derain's -correct- 'Cezannism': present below the surface in a similar brush-stroke that in finishing victoriously the academic exercise vibrates chaotically with a manual ability that becomes mental. It is in fact the 'hand of the mind' — if you will - that sets down on the panel of the 1926 Pietà a brush-stroke with a touch that is a light but plastic fringe in the result as a whole (the 'skimming' for example of an arid field in the Tre Donne (Three Women) of 1926-1927). A light trailing of the paintbrush — thick with deep pigments squashed all over the canvas and agitated in all directions, yet not insistent in its path — which was that of Derain and that here finds the limit of its own exhalation in that -plastic order- in which (in the meanwhile) it was being hidden in the metaphysical mystery that had brought our painter to that point: to discover the mystery of --Nature in its causes».

It is a reversal, a revivrement, of terms gone back slowly to their roots. While nature having 'gone ahead' in its reality produces one impression, nature having 'gone back' in its casuality produces the lasting value of a tone that is being conceived as it returns to the origins themselves of the vision. It should also be said that in the idea in fieri, the vision breaks away from the mere causality of the naturalistic motif. One must add though that in Castellani's work, this 'turning back' to the source does not imply a regression so much as, in its rational slowness, a progressive sense of historical awareness, which serves not in adherence to the «Novecento» movement — as some have all too hurriedly sustained [iv] — but rather to create the framework of the composition, in order to insert in it solid, indestructible, well-defined forms.

In such difficult years of formal and moralistic restoration, Castellani with his palette set himself against the ostentation and the tendencies of the period, touching instead its true spirit, along free but mysterious and hidden paths. He invented the space, media, light and harmony of tones: becoming at times 'archaic' (in his La creazione dell'uomo (The Creation of man) and Le offerte di Caino e Abele (The offerings of Cain and Abel), both of 1926); at times melancholy (Le bagnanti (Women bathing) of 1926-1927). At times he brings together figures burnt by shadows against the 'screen' of a background that has absorbed the suffused gleam of a clear night, as if for a meeting of imaginary evocations (La favola (The Fairytale), 1927). He dissolves faint aspects and fleeting nuances of things in the sweet light of morning (see the series Impressioni (Impressions) of 1928-1929); he makes waves of light cross the delicate surface of seawater (Venezia (Venice), 1926). He flattens and stretches out trees on walls and walls against the sky, in an inlay rich with gradations of green, brown, pink, and sky blue tones (Case a Stra (Houses in Stra) in 1928 and Le rocce di San Leo (The cliffs of San Leo) in 1928-1929). Each object is reduced to its poetic and expressive essence beyond its substance, catching the primitive motif that sets the painter's imagination in motion, supporting it in the search for an analogic method capable of transcribing time, that is, of turning time in its natural existence into the immobile time of painting.