The picture shows a box decorated with a staff. It is the container of the staff entitled: I.M. Enrico Castellani (and numbered #81).
The painted container and the sculpture are my tributes to Enrico Castellani’s works of art; his formalist poems in silver and white. Most of all I like his paper stack. Spartito, 1969/2004.
(Read more of Enrico Castellani in The Guardian)
It is also a tribute to Celleno where he lived until his death in December 2017. Celleno where I like to work in wintertime. Celleno reminds me of the village I grew up in. All people connected. Connectivity and reunion are my subjects in my art practice.
In the village I grew up in, there lived a painter at the time. His studio was located between kindergarten and home. At a friend’s house during primary school, I saw one of his gloomy but yet intriguing paintings of a swamp. Before I left the village to go to high-school, I tried to get up the nerve to interview him in his studio.
He answered my questions while he was working on a painting. At one point he pushed his brush in purple paint – I was afraid he was distracted or irritated because of my questions and would soon spoil the painting with this ugly purple. The opposite happened, the painting gained more meaning instead! It was an eye-opening event!
In Celleno I hoped for an equally inspiring meeting, but in fact I was a month too late; when I arrived in January 2018 Enrico Castellani had just passed away, aged 87.
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Some months later I made these ‘poems’ in black, white and gold dedicated to the artist Enrico Castellani and his direct environment.
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