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| MICHELE CASTAGNETTI: FUTURISME A hundred years ago, a group of Italians created a way of life out of art. From the visual ideas and practices devised by the Cubists in cutting-edge Paris, the Milan-based band of avant gardists deduced ways of making music, theater, literature, and even food, clothing, sex and war. As the Cubists had broken the mold of pictorial art, the Italian Futurists broke the mold of everything else. Several generations later, tacitly acknowledging the centenary of the 20th century’s most revolutionary movement, the Futurists’ compatriot Michele Castagnetti honors their achievement and re-examines their aesthetic with his own abstractions. Exploiting the new digital technology, as the machine-happy Futurists would have, Castagnetti produces several kinds of abstract painting (literally pigment print on canvas, a kind of “painting with machines”). One kind mirrors the nervous, fractured way the Futurists reconfigured and reordered their world. Jagged forms interlock in visual approximations of landscapes and figures. Shapes seem to have their own vibration, their edges bending at brittle angles and their contours echoed by other shapes nearby or across the picture. These paintings Castagnetti calls “Futurisme” (using the French spelling of the Italian “Futurismo,” reminding us that Futurism’s first manifesto appeared in Paris several months before its original Italian version hit the Milan streets). There are other Futurist strategies in Castagnetti’s approach as well. There is a single work he has essayed, a promising experiment with minimalist forms and colors – and numbers. It’s as much a conceptual as it is a painterly investigation, determining a geometric landscape with black, white and red and, in those numbers, including its own proportional measurements. By contrast, his largest series of paintings, the “Circuits,” sets intricate patterns of squares and circles dancing across – or into – horizontal structures, their rhythms proving irresistible and their colorations, seemingly borrowed from the decorator palettes of the 1970s, at once alluring and hilarious. A similarly campy touch pervades the “Fiori” series – the least “purely” abstract of the lot – with their own sour colors and flat, stylized representations of some sort of plant form, tall and stiff and elegant, more akin to, say, decorations on dinnerware than to real flowers. But this jaunty parody of the past is part of the cockeyed charm with which Castagnetti has imbued his canvases. If he references Futurism itself in his “Futurisme” series, in his other abstract series he exploits Futurism’s own caustic attitude towards the past – although instead of dismissing it as so much psychic baggage and insisting that the museums be destroyed, Castagnetti embraces it at once lovingly and mockingly, reviving popular visual expressions only to achieve a sort of optical transcendence by amplifying their earmarks into some sort of strange visual apotheosis. The “Circuits,” for instance, marry scientific forms to space-age designs; the “Fiori” marry eternal nature to erstwhile high style. Michele Castagnetti allows plenty of wit into his work, but he’s serious about the spirit and method he has inherited from his Futurist forebears. Wanting his work to be at the same time elegant and off-putting, he makes pictorial and production decisions that defy and yet speak in the language of high art, and that ape popular visual forms without disappearing into them. Something of a “newbrow” abstractionist, Castagnetti has his cake – baked in a Futurist kitchen – and eats it, too. Peter Frank, Los Angeles, December 2009 |
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