Borderless Surfaces

WeGallery is pleased to announce Borderless Surfaces, a double personal show by Enrico Castellani (IT, 1930) and Ulrike Mohr (DE, 1970). Following “Die Große Revolte” with Nanni Balestrini and Andrea Salvino in February 2016, with this exhibition WeGallery presents, for the first time in a Berlin Gallery, Enrico Castellani and carries on with its new programme aiming at making different generations of artists come together in a dialogue made possible by their “ethical” participation based on an elective potential, wherein the generational difference is enhanced and/or annulled within space-time and is evidenced through artistic activity, while the oeuvres are displayed in their exemplarity and singularity. In this perspective WeGallery recognizes in Enrico Castellani’s historical works and Ulrike Mohr’s installations an event of importance for the quality and clarity of their aesthetic perception, and identifies in the monochrome – or better in the black/white polarity – an intense “face to face” dialogue, further enhanced by the peculiar conception of space which permeates the work of both artists.

At the foundation of the environmental installation is Slicing Time (2016) by Mohr, black log, 12 metres in length produced by a process of carbonization and obtained through oxygen reduction in a special stove. In Castellani, the white and black pictorial surfaces are modelled on ups and downs, on negative and positive poles wherein light is channelled and the spectator’s eye may venture into the movements in the canvas.

Both Castellani’s and Mohr’s works follow schemes constructed with grids. A surface harmony according to which each extroversion is positioned to form its specular introversion; a texture of wooden fragments that modulates the perceptive chaos of the “spatial drawings” by the use of parallel lines. The unitary result of the Borderless Surfaces is a gaze that opens up avenues to re-evaluation, to a shared perception of the oeuvre’s aesthetic meaning. Works that could expand to the infinite: canvasses that unframed would appear boundless; tree trunks where branches would have the possibility of multiplying. An attention to the handcraft praxis in artistic objects, understood as a fundamentally collective act which has within itself all the ethical, political and social facets of Italian reality in the 1960’s in Castellani; as an activator of thoughts linked to our contemporary times, evidently on the wake of Beuysian thought and with a reference to Nature typical of German sensibility, in Mohr.

The viewer is asked an active involvement with the works displayed, whether it is absorbed inside and in the extension of a dynamic surface or instead introduced in a “trench” made of endless slips inside a tight structure that transforms the dis-order in order “other”.

A dialogue between two artistic endeavours and two artistic personalities belonging to different generations, therefore, in a dual setting, where the black and the white, the natural and the artificial, the bi-dimensional and the tri-dimensional, the negative and positive poles meet and clash in a succession of cross-references.

With the poetic contribution of Nanni Balestrini