Guglielmo Castelli

Curated by Milovan Farronato

16 April – 7 July 2024
from Wednesday to Sunday, 11- 18
Vernissage: Monday 15 April, from 18 to 20
Istituzione Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa
Palazzetto Tito, Dorsoduro 2826, Venezia

Istituzione Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice, will stage an exhibition of new works by Italian artist Guglielmo Castelli (b. 1987, Turin), opening Monday 15 April 2024. Improving Songs for Anxious Children, curated by Milovan Farronato, brings together a new series of paintings, maquettes, textiles and kinetic sculptures which, taken together, examine the thin boundary between fragility and violence. The exhibition coincides with the opening of La Biennale d'Arte di Venezia 2024.

Guglielmo Castelli’s unique iconographic universe draws from the worlds of literature, theatre and scenography. The exhibition title, Improving Songs for Anxious Children, is drawn from a children’s book published at the turn of the twentieth century which warns against carelessness, distraction, lying and other apparently immoral behaviours in children. Found in the New York Public Library, the book inspired Castelli to consider “the age that was once common to everyone; of first times, of attempts, of knowledge of oneself and others… of inexorable failures and scraped knees”.

Castelli’s sense of worldbuilding, drawn from an agglomeration of European literary and theatre references and accented by autobiography, informs a series of interior settings which reflect and reproduce the self. His treatment of space is liquid: figures bend to and are restricted by their confines. Distorted perspective and a sense of enclosure binds the figures with their surroundings, synonymous with a child’s experience of growing and recomposing themselves, forming within and around their environment.

Castelli imagines the interior life of a hypothetical “child left at home” through works which feature recurring motifs: the underside of a kitchen table, splotches of apple that look like Rorschach inkblots, the peeled layers of an onion. Castelli remarks that these “give moral accents and behaviours in their representations that are now out of fashion, out of time, in a contemporaneity that goes too fast”. Incorporating delicate and breakable materials – glass, ceramics, and lace – and often glazed in green hues, the powerful visual language of Castelli’s works take on a shadowy neurosis that is Kafkaesque, and a ghoulish and theatrical metaphysicality that recalls de Chirico. Domestic objects like glasses, scissors, tables, shoes and thread recur in tones that conjure a certain passing of time: rust, soil, senescent leaves and copper oxide.

Milovan Farronato says: “Guglielmo Castelli is a Turin painter whose critically acclaimed work features a stylistic signature characterised by liquid and osmotic painting. Pure and hypnotic abstractions foreground figurations with distorted and contorted perspectives that interact with their escaping shadows. His pictorial language has its roots and references in literature and theatre, both as a field of research and as a desire to represent narrated images, exhibiting tones that are often melancholic, which often sees dominance in the colour green and its many declensions. For the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, the artist intends to create a new series of paintings of various sizes - it is his practice to work in both small formats and canvases composed of several panels and divided into large dimensions. Conceived specifically for the walls and rooms of Palazzetto Tito, they will become liquid reflections of the water propagated from the frosted glass of the windows overlooking the canal, enveloping new and ancient narratives set in Venice. The paintings will be in the company of mixed media sculptures, works on paper and several embroideries, purqua pas?”

The exhibition is supported by Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, New York, Brussels, Paris; and Rodeo, London, Piraeus.​​

Notes to Editors
Press Contact: Isabel Davies, isabel@sam-talbot.com, +44 7511 700240

Guglielmo Castelli (b. 1987, Turin) lives and works in Turin. His group and solo shows include: Arts Club # 38, Villa Medici, Accademia di Francia, Rome (2024); Diario Notturno, MAXXI Aquila, L’Aquila (2023); mutating bodies, imploding stars, OGR Torino, Turin, (2023); A Lover’s Discourse, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2023); Demonios Familiares, Mendes Wood DM, New York (2023); The Cabin LA Presents: A Curated Flashback, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2023); A knife with no blade, missing its handle, Rodeo, London and Piraeus (2022); Espressioni con Frazioni, Castello di Rivoli, Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin (2022); Quel jour sommes-nous?, Tokonoma, Kassel (2022); IN SITU; Rare earths, ExpoChicago, Chicago (2022); Calm Act in closed room, Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2021); Ornate Impotence, The Cabin, Los Angeles (2020); FUORI, 17a Quadriennale di Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2020); Stasi Frenetica, GAM, Turin (2020); Sia inteso come tutto ciò che non pesa, Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza (2019); Sia inteso come tutto ciò che non pesa, Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza, (2019); Goodmorning Bambino, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2018); Goodmorning Bambino, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2018); A Strong Desire, PS120, Berlin (2018); Biennale Internationale d’art contemporain de Melle, Melle (2018); INTRIGUING UNCERTAINTIES, The Parkview Museum, Singapore (2018); CHALLENGING BEAUTY—Insights into Italian Contemporary Art, The Parkview Museum, Singapore (2018); Recto/Verso 2, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2018); Asomatognosia, Sala Reale, Porta Nuova, Turin (2017); Intriguing Uncertainties, Museum of Contemporary Art of Saint-Étienne, Saint-Étienne (2016); Dittico, Museum of Contemporary Art, Lissone (2016); The Habit of a Foreign Sky, Ardessi Palace Futurdome, Milan (2016); VAF Foundations Price, Palazzo Penna, Perugia (2015); VAF Foundations, Stadtgalerie, Kiel (2014).

Milovan Farronato is an independent curator and art critic. He curated the Italian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. He directed the Fiorucci Art Trust until its extinction in 2021. He developed the itinerant residency project Roadside Picnic and, from 2011 until 2019, the annual Volcano Extravaganza festival, born in Stromboli and then migrated first to Naples in 2017 and then to Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2018. With Paulina Olowska he gave life to the Mycorial Theater symposium held in 2014 in Rabka, Poland, and in 2016 in São Paulo, Brazil. He collaborated with Serpentine Galleries for the Magazine Sessions (2016). Farronato conceived The violent No!, part of the public program of the 14th Istanbul Biennale in 2015. From 2005 to 2012 Farronato was director of the non-profit organisation Viafarini and curator at the DOCVA Documentation Center for Visual Arts in Milan. From 2006 to 2010 he was Associate Curator of the Civic Gallery of Modena and, from 2008 to 2015, professor of Visual Culture at the IUAV University claDEM. Among the curated exhibitions: Nightfall, with Fernanda Brenner and Erika Verzutti, Mendes Wood DM, Bruxelles (2018); Nick Mauss, Illuminated Window, La Triennale and Torre Velasca, Milan (2017); Lucy McKenzie’s first solo show in Italy, La Kermesse Héroïque, Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Venice (2017); the solo exhibition of Peter Doig, for the same institution in Venice (2015); and Arimortis, Museo del Novecento, Milan (2013), co-curated with Roberto Cuoghi. Milovan Farronato was a member of the curatorial team of the IV Dhaka Art Summit and part of the Development Committee of the Chisenhale Gallery in London. He is part of the advisory board for Turkish Pavilion in Venice 2022 and 2024. He founded with Andrea Bellini the Archivio of Chiara Fumai, Milan.