Castagna Maurizio 1961 - XL - Collisione Silenziosa

Maurizio Castagna (1961)
“Silent Collision”
Mixed media on canvas
Hand-signed on front and back.
Certificate of authenticity included.
Trained at the Albertina Academy of Turin, Maurizio Castagna belongs to that strand of Italian painting which, while drawing its roots from figurative tradition and the great craft of the trade, progressively evolves toward a gestural, informal, and energetic dimension. His research traverses decades of technical and material experimentation, always maintaining at its center the physical value of the painterly gesture as emotional and cognitive experience.
After early works tied to classical painting and projects for important ecclesiastical commissions — including the monumental canvas dedicated to the Stoning of Saint Stephen for the Bishop’s Curia of Asti directed by architect Don Quaglia, as well as official portraits of H.E. Mons. Sibilla, H.E. Mons. Bommarito, and H.E. Mons. Garssia — Castagna develops a personal language in which matter becomes a territory of tension and stratification.
In Silent Collision the famous radial motif that characterizes his production transforms into an energetic nucleus suspended between implosion and expansion. The large central field, dense and almost crater-like, emerges from a weave of nervous marks, scratches, drips, and chromatic trajectories that traverse the surface with centrifugal force. The circle, distant from any geometric rigidity, asserts itself as a living organism, a pulsation, a painting event.
The composition fully reveals the artist’s complex technique: successive layers of pigments, acrylics, enamels, resins, and egg tempera coexist on a highly tactile surface where each intervention leaves a trace and memory beneath subsequent layers. Castagna’s painting is not built through a rigidly predetermined project, but arises from an impulsive and instinctive process, close to surrealist automatism and the American tradition of Action Painting. The gesture frees itself from all conventions to become primal energy, universal language, emotional discharge.
In this work one senses echoes of the gestural tension of Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning, the atmospheric depth of Mark Rothko, as well as the chromatic sensibility of European Informalism — from Afro to Birolli — yet filtered through a genuinely personal voice. Castagna does not pursue mere decorative abstraction: he rather constructs fields of emotional interference, painterly places where matter, light, and sign collide.
As Okwui Enwezor observed:
“Castagna’s Painting neither represents nor expresses an objective or subjective reality: it discharges a tension that has accumulated inside…”
The artist’s works are in public and private collections in Europe, the United States, Dubai, China, and Japan, and have been published in important Italian art catalogues, including the Catalogo d’Arte Moderna Italiana published by Giorgio Mondadori and the Bolaffi Catalogue.
A work of strong visual impact and notable matter presence, particularly representative of the most mature and recognizable phase of Maurizio Castagna’s research.