Lorenzelli Arte is happy to present Surfaces et Correspondences; a meeting between two great contemporary artists: Enrico Castellani and Lee Ufan. These apparently different artists, culturally distanced with diverse artistic trajectories, are substantially linked by great conceptual and theoretical rigor and a rarefied and synthetic language that amplifies and expands energy by means of the variability and modularity of composition.
The exhibition, curated by Matteo Lorenzelli and Federico Sardella, realized with the help of the artists themselves and the Fondazione Enrico Castellani, presents, in all three exhibition spaces of the gallery, ten works of each artist executed from the 1960s to the present.
This exhibition is part of Arte Milano that, on the occasion of Expo 2015, is bringing together five of some of the most important Milanese art galleries and two very weighty foundations, all of whom are active on an international level. Arte Milano is sponsored by the City of Milan, and follows in the footsteps of the 1971 Arte Milano, an initiative of a similar type in which seven galleries gave birth to a magazine of the same name with the aim of creating a platform for the discussion of national and international art issues.
Today, as then, seven galleries; Lorenzelli Arte, Galleria Milano, Galleria Blue, Galleria Tonelli/Studio La Città, Studio Giangleazzo Visconti, Fondazione Marconi and Fondazione Mudima are offering a rich calendar of exhibitions and events, plus the re-publication of the magazine Arte Milano, that is to be distributed in Italy and abroad at no cost to the reader. The intent is to underline and reiterate the central role that Milan plays in the promotion of contemporary art and culture.
Enrico Castellani and Lee Ufan have been a part of Lorenzelli Arte's exhibition history since March of 1986, the date of Castellani's first exhibition in the gallery. Castellani followed with two one-man shows in 1991. Ufan exhibited in the gallery again in May of 1997. All the above shows have their respective catalogues, with texts by Gillo Dorfles, Walter Guadagnini and Adachiara Zevi for Castellani; by Flaminio Gialdoni and Tommaso Trini for Ufan.
Expo 2015 puts the city of Milan and the international exposition's theme under the world spotlight. Matteo Lorenzelli has decided to associate the voices of two very important contemporary artists to this context. Their lucid and coherent artistic research, that has roots in the early 1960s and continues to the present day, has placed their work in the most important private collections and museums in the world.
Enrico Castellani and Lee Ufan had their formal training in very distant cultural contexts; the one in Italy and Belgium, the other in Korea and Japan. They followed different routes, entered the art scene with a ten year difference one from the other, but their paths soon crossed on the common ground of affinities, corresponding sensibilities and slight, progressive variations in the modulation of their painting surface and in a common artistic research that merges an attention to visual perception with that of the creative stimulation of thought.
Their paintings are animated by brightness and shadow, by rhythm and structure (we can note this in the extraordinary Superficie Bianca by Enrico Castellani from 1976 208x285 cm. or in the that of 1967 180 x180 cm.), by an obstinate dialogue between emptiness and fullness and the vibrancy of the pictorial mark (as in the large Lee Ufan canvases from the With Winds series of 1991), and they interact with their surrounding space and the viewer. The varied monochrome of Castellani's temporal and spatial intervals and Lee Ufan's white backgrounds on which float his meditative and rigorous brushstrokes offer the viewer the chance to meet and interact with the spaces within and without the paintings, between the physical reality and three dimensionality of the work, such as occurs with Relatum by Lee Ufan or with the surfaces in relief by Castellani: images with clear evidence of a need for the absolute that animates both of their artistic processes. In this expansion between identity and otherness, between the itself and the non-itself, between structure and rhythmic movement lies the joyful and fortunate unpredictability of the meeting between Enrico Castellani and Lee Ufan, and also the chance for the viewer to immerse him or herself, with an active eye, into a space open to the infinity of dialogue and the depth of the mind.
On the occasion of this exhibition a bilingual catalogue has been published with reproductions of all the work shown in the exhibition, a series of images relevant to both artists' trajectory, and texts by Enrico Castellani, Lee Ufan and Federico Sardella.
