STABLE UNSTABLE
Enzo Castagno, dalle caverne della terra alle grate del cielo

The images of fire are,
for whom who dreams and thinks,
a school of intensity.

Gaston Bachelard

It was Bachelard who, in a poem on fire, wrote: "Fire is never static: il lives when it sleeps". Always undecided between spark and fire, between comfort and risk is the idea of burning, to be consumed in order to cleanse one-self and be born again. Playing with fire means playing with the sources of life. The sculptor gives form with the cynicism of a miracle worker; he cooks, cools and fires his mineral sons, changing the face of the material as if he would be, the jaw of an opponent. The sport of sculpture is a violent and philosophical one.

For many years now Enzo Castagno works on the construction of a vast number of pierced cylinders making some of them more glass-lava others more stone-porous like, he fires the clay at the highest temperatures in a kiln of cost iron that camps in his studio and which certainly makes one feel uneasy (inside would fit a crouched man). lt is un alchemist's work, made up of continuous attempts and failures in order to find the right composition and right heat curve.

What he extracts from the kiln however is only the departure material far his construction of meaning. Here the ceramist ends and the geometric narrator begins: the Sumerian cylinders become two - or three-dimensional grids, rolled up abacuses which evoke mathematical or urbanistic associations. Without no almost abstract meditation it is impossibile to uphold the expression of the non-organised space. Without the network we are almost lost, shipwreck victims under the rocks of chaos or in the abysses of empty spaces.

The design of the grid is clear-cut, surgical, even when it comes out its hinges. Like in Senza titolo (pag.15) where the enigmatic square on the left gives way to its right portion, falls to 90 degrees from the wall and holds out a concave palm lo the viewer - a hand thal invites te enter or to give. Like in Senza titolo (pag.21) where a square deprives itself of some elements in order to colonize the adjacent space with a circular foundation. And again in Senza titolo (pag.13) where the centre accommodates a quotation of its own dissection a phantom limb with the tracks of the net imprinted in fire. Of this series Bisanzio impresses. The work plays with unexpected changes in its arrangement of planes, opening ond closing the doors of history. Everything is decline and recovery, liberty and oppression - cursed and irrevocably interwoven.

Apart from the grids on the wall, the refractory is used for building true constructions such as Pira, in the magic dimension 30x30x30. A perfect paradox: a pyre resistant to fire. A dangerous and illusionary obiect, a siren of death in disguise of conspiring curved ond linear spaces (a mnemonic reflex which takes one back to India or ancient Rome). Il bears the still warm imprint of a small corpse that has just vanished away. Hence the expression dead weight: it weights more. The absence of o body cries out contagious oblivion. One longs to lie down and to drop a lit match in drowsiness. Or the ash of a cigarette, as Dali has done chasing the ghosts of unconditional inspiration. The following construction we encounter is Lari, a domestic altar, or, taking into account its sheer force, a temple. It contains a black and shining mass of burned origin which could also be an optical skein that absorbs the rays of light. It could also be a window on Creation: where all comes to an end, everything can have its beginning. What is important - but only a suggestion, as the readings open themselves with a sunburst - is the archetype of the spiritual house in front of which the god of no individual religion prays.

In geometric terms we can describe it as an apory: the squaring of the square. Only that the external arms slide in a centrifugal movement in which the square spirals down endlessly, anticipating the theme of infinity central lo another work in the exhibition. The question whether it is the red structure or the black heart that is stronger bears no importance: they are in contact with each other and form a mysterious stele. Separated from one another, each wouid be a temple without aura.

The universe is fluid and iridescet,
language is rigid.

Jorge Luis Borges

The eye calms down. It lands on soft ground. Mind and retina align like the rods of a magnet reaching a state of equilibrium. It is in this slowed down cone of perception where, for unceasing underground collisions the conscience of art is born; between things that meet in the sky and things that sway under the microscope, between new forms and primordial symbols. Art has this terrible characteristic lo generale things through marking the bounds of the unconscious, inside and out, inside and out. Maybe for this reason one is upset like a funeral or excited like a firework?

He who regulariy sees abstract art knows that a rigid and insolent eye does not lead very far. The game is more subtle. It requires no act of trust in the author and allowing oneself being led - where to, no one knows - in short, if one wants lo experience the privilege of participation, one has to be able lo leave the rucksack of information that bends one's eyes on one's shoulders for at least a few moments. Afterwards, and only then, can we restart the machines, re-open the eyes of culture and position the work in an epoch, a biennale or in any other castle of significance one fancies. Education at a slowed-down glance: this is the core of the problem if one assumes thal art is more than a simple language in general.

In other spaces light
has spread itself out ioyfully.

Novalis

It is worthwhile lo return to the accelerator of the materials dormant state, Castagno's kiln: the heat that accompanies the material to its moulding state, followed by its return lo normality, its skin bearing the sign of the descent to the beings of afterlife. Unexpected things of great depth happen; the forms surrender lo the caress of the thermic wave and have lo surrender themselves lo their destiny. The artist describes how the pulverised glass rests on the earth, how in the kiln the paste is absorbed under its skin and reappears again on the surface, a shining essence bound to an opaque body. He describes how the colour comes to light, a captured and change- able colour that originates fiera tunnels and obscure fears but which has earned itself the right to surface and, in tireless incrustation, to survive itself and the pitiless kiln. Some colours vanish in high temperatures while others flourish. All one extracts is a selection of samples of photonic spectres. As Castagno holds: 'Light is born out of obscurity."

Even if one succeeds it will not serve anything;
there are still all the courtyards to cross,
and so it goes on for millenniums.

Franz Kafka

The decisive work in the exhibition, the one that sums up the existent circle and opens the future circle is probably Corpo Refrattario, the large magic monitor composed of 16 asymmetric pentagons.

The pentagons of Castagno could grow to the infinite. The colour changes slightly, the enigmalic organism radiates silent glows. It could devour the wall, the gallery, the city ... without danger to be hold up. It is a dizzy spell on the abyss of statistic projections. As one catches a glimpse of deviation within this logic stalactite, it equals a futuristic experiment that could fail from one moment to another. (Like in the cinematographic film genre on epidemics in which one always awaits the scene in which the expert demonstrates the extent of the catastrophe by illustrating the geometric progression of the disease.)
In his creation, Castagno opts for a geometric resonance of the magic square in which the sum of numbers emerges unchanged line by line (Castagno remembers the square cited by Albrecht Dùrer in his 1514 work Melancholia I), At this point the form structures itself by symmetrical veins, generating, at least in some cases, a constant space. Nobody can foretell how long this alliance of force may last: the obvious curbing of disintegration acts like a reminder of instability.
The geometry of the figures turns into the geometry of billows. The breaking point cannot be very far and the infinite kaleidoscopic combinations of the figure form and consume themselves in its anticipation. The infinite is synonymous to the finger that touches the sore spot, it is the unsettling hypnotising state of folly that has fascinated men of belief and science, from Zenone and Aristotle to Leibniz and Bruno.

It brings lo mind the motifs of the azuleios of medieval Andalusio in which stars and geometric motifs create both, a regular pattern and a sequence of opposing planes, like the fractions of Mandelbrot, making anybody who watches them for a long time experience a slight sensation of vertigo. lt is not so much the dizziness created by fear of heights but of progression. The feeling changes according to whether one watches the small or the large texture.

The geometric body contains the virus of multiplication and can permeate the wall in seconds but it can also remain immobile far centuries. In any case is it a strong metaphor far sociai instability A disfigured and loose network that falls prey lo chaos. An instability that, according to the school of laissez-faire thinking, is thought to cause development and bring opportunity, which we however, endure like forebodings of the erosion of the earth beneath our feet. Corpo Refrattario is the manifestation/confession of how much each of us is capable to grasp change only with difficully.

Between the contradictions a symbol of unity
and totality forms itself spontaneously,
it is not important if it reaches the conscience or not.

Carl Gustav Jung

The pursuit of symbolic connections and the simultaneous game with different levels of interpretation speak for Castagno's highly mature language by which, setting out from a liquefied and instable materiali he arrives al constructing lines and architectural installations that appear almost moral due to their classical illumination and stringency. Today, the crystal of form is born out of the malleability of space. (Even though the evolution in power continues io smoulder beneath the ashes of a cooled-down installation). From the bowels of an obscure and romantically solipsistic nature one has risen again to the consortium of humons, to the presence, one could also say to reality. The network on the other hand - this permeation to the limits of metaphoric obsession produced by the 20th century and the act of incarnating itself in the hive of the web - is one of the keys to understand a global world that thrives on itself. The grids of Castagno give a voice lo a world that thinks and deals everything-together-at-the-same-time and which hos consecrated the idea of the network to a social model. Contemporaneously, and in keeping at due distance from positivist clichés however, the network takes on a critical responsibility: it has not yet been proven that the network governs better than other systems of instability Out of this comes the challenge to allow the co-existence of the individual and the group, to find an equilibrium between the libertarian drives of the individuai and the planning requirements of the system.

Thirteen years have passed since Castagno's first one-man show at the Grossetti gallery for which Andrea Inglese wrote in its accompanying catalogue about 'plastic haemorrhage' and the earth having the intensity of 'flesh'. The pursuit has shifted its direction - yesterday there was material and nature, today we find symbols and exis- tence of relationships - but the method of arranging the facts onto the stable/instable axis remains consistent In both art and life, these are the two poles of every possible evolution.

Eugenio Alberti Schatz


Testo Eugenio Alberti Schatz, Milano - Traduzione Lisa Hockemeyer, Londra
Fotografie Daniele Casadio, Michele Buda, Ravenna
Progetto grafico catalogo Matteo Curti, Milano