Castagna Maurizio 1961 - XL - Archeologia dell’Anima

MAURIZIO CASTAGNA
Archaeology of the Soul
Mixed media on canvas, 100 × 80 cm
In Archaeology of the Soul, Maurizio Castagna continues his inquiry into the deeper, invisible dimension of the human being, transforming the pictorial surface into a place of memory, sedimentation, and discovery.
From an intensely tactile ocher background, as if a wall worn by time, emerges an anthropomorphic presence that is never fully revealed. The figure appears and at the same time dissolves: energetic blacks, reds, deep blues, and sudden green accents overlaying scratches, lattices, incisions, and gestural traces. The painting thus becomes a true interior archaeology, in which every mark seems to belong to a different layer of memory.
The spirals and radial structures, recurring elements in Castagna’s research, here take on the value of enigmatic coordinates: they evoke time, movement, origin, and that continuous tension between order and chaos that threads through his production. The subject is therefore not only the depicted figure but the very process of its surfacing.
The work sits within the continuity of the artist’s long exploration of the human condition, of memory, and of the possibility of rendering visible what belongs to the inner realm. Matter does not constitute a background but houses the traces of what has been: Castagna idealistically excavates in painting as one would dig into memory.
The artist
Maurizio Castagna develops his painting through more than fifty years of work, after training at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin. Beginning with figurative painting, he progressively developed a personal language in which figuration, abstraction, gesture, and material experimentation coexist.
Over the course of his career he has also produced important sacred and monumental works, including the Lashing of Saint Stephen, a large composition measuring 3.50 × 2.20 meters. His work has been documented in publications by Bolaffi and Giorgio Mondadori. In recent years his research has increasingly focused on the relationship between matter, sign, light, and interiority, up to the recent compositions in which the figure seems to emerge as a memory from the painted surface.
Archaeology of the Soul represents one of the most intense outcomes of this research: not a portrait of an individual, but the attempt to bring to the surface the invisible traces of being."