Curated by Milovan Farronato

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.​​

Text by Istituzione Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa