For the next event in the Art Club cycle, Villa Medici invites Turin-based painter Guglielmo Castelli. Drawing his inspiration from literature, theater, and art history, Guglielmo Castelli develops a world where human and animal figures, landscape fragments, natural elements, and scenes from everyday life mix and conflate. Through his figurative painting, with its magmatic flat tints and fluid subjects, he sets narratives into perpetual, practically cinematographic, motion.

The setting for these stories is the gardens of Villa Medici: five works by Guglielmo Castelli are on display in the Atelier Balthus, the Studiolo of Ferdinando de’ Medici, and the Gypsotheque (a former workshop now housing plaster casts of statues, busts, and reliefs). These include four oils on canvas: the diptych I Believe in the Nights (2021); Buon Vento (2023); Le Jardin des Refusés, and The Mutiny’s Space (2022), as well as a tapestry made from recycled plastic and natural threads, Dorofoco. Bonotto for a Collection (2020). This group of works takes visitors on a chromatic journey, with each piece holding a riddle to be solved.

Text by Villa Medici