Castagna Maurizio 1961 - XL - Aurora Su Exo - Terra

A highly collectible work of art, Aurora on Exo-Terra – Hidden Visions No. 2 pays a refined tribute to René Magritte, transforming the theme of illusion into a rare pictorial experience of double vision light/dark. An intense and conceptual piece by Maurizio Castagna, ideal for contemporary art collectors.

Aurora su Exo-Terra – Hidden Visions No. 2 is a work that exists on a physical and mental threshold: a broken door, deliberately painted in darkness, emerging as a gap in imbalance, declaring from the very first glance that appearances are deceptive. It is here that its conceptual heart is revealed: an explicit homage to René Magritte, master of unsettling revelation and paradoxical poetry.
Castagna does not cite Magritte: he interrogates him.
Return to his famous statement — 'Nothing is as it seems' — and transform it into pictorial matter. The off-axis door, which in the darkness reveals only a suspended crescent moon, becomes a contemporary translation of Magritte's philosophy: the image as an enigma, reality as illusion, vision as an act of suspicion.
In the light, the work explodes into a dense abstract weave, built through overlays of pigments, resins, egg tempera, and enamels. Each layer remains visible, a memory of a gesture that refuses to be erased. Castagna, confident in his extensive academic and figurative experience, employs a deep knowledge of the craft that coexists with impulse, surrealist automatism, and emotional immediacy.
And it is in the dark that the homage to Magritte becomes a manifesto.
The painting sheds its material excess and remains an essential scene: the luminous door, the emptiness beyond, the thin moon. It’s as if the work has two identities, two planes of reality, just like the paintings of the Belgian master that separated the visible from the invisible. This dual nature – day and night – places the painting at the center of the series 'Hidden Visions,' where Castagna invites the viewer to an experience that does not end with immediate perception.
The work continues to act, to change, to reveal itself only under particular conditions: a conceptual gesture consistent with the surrealist tradition, but filtered through a contemporary sensibility.
It gives rise to a declaration of poetics.
A conscious homage to Magritte.
— an exercise of vision that breaks the evidence,
A threshold to an elsewhere where painting does not depict, but reveals.
As Okwui Enwezor wrote:
Castagna's painting neither represents nor expresses an objective or subjective reality: it releases a tension that has accumulated inside... it is he who chooses the colors, doses their quantities, and with his gestures determines the right emotion and suggestion of the work.
'Aurora on Exo-Terra' is not a static image but a living organism, a window open to an inner landscape that changes under the viewer's gaze.
A work that confirms the strength and vitality of great contemporary painting, exalted by its dual light/dark vision, a rare element with a significant collector's impact.
Origin and international dissemination
Castagna Maurizio's works are found in public and private collections across Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Middle East, and Asia, including France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, the UK, the USA, Dubai, China, and Japan.
Published in numerous catalogs and art magazines, including Catalogo Bolaffi, Il Quadrato, and the Catalogo d’Arte Moderna Italiana – Giorgio Mondadori.