Castagna Maurizio 1961 - XL - Attrazione Instabile

Maurizio Castagna – “Unstable Attraction”
Unstable Attraction arises from Maurizio Castagna’s most recent research, an artist with over fifty years of painting experience and training gained at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin. The long path of the artist, started in dialogue with figuration and developed also through works of monumental and religious character – including the Lamentation of Saint Stephen, measuring about 3.50 × 2.20 meters – has, over time, known a progressive liberation of the image, until arriving at a painting in which matter, gesture, and sign assume a predominant role. His activity has also been documented over the years in art repertoires and publications such as Bolaffi and Giorgio Mondadori.
It is precisely in light of this evolution that Unstable Attraction can be read as a work particularly representative of Castagna’s current research. The clear and strongly tactile surface is not merely a background, but becomes an integral part of the composition: sedimentations, abrasions, drips, and overlaps give the canvas the appearance of a material traversed by time. On it intervene brown and black masses, green trajectories, and rare orange-inflected accents, creating a painterly field traversed by continual tensions.
Spirals, radial cores, lines, and geometric fragments emerge and disappear within the material, generating different points of attraction without any one able to definitively impose itself as the center of the composition. From this condition derives the title Unstable Attraction: every element seems to seek a balance with what surrounds it, but that balance is immediately reexamined by the subsequent gesture.
Castagna’s figurative training is thus not simply abandoned, but transformed through a painting process matured over decades of work. For every construction there is erasure, for geometry there is dripping, for control of sign there is the unpredictability of matter. The result is a painting attributable to gestural abstraction and material-based abstract expressionism, but characterized by a personal vocabulary in which circles, spirals, trajectories, and energetic cores become tools for investigating movement, balance, and transformation.
Technical experimentation has long accompanied this evolution: pigments, acrylics, enamels, resins, and different stratifications are used by Castagna to obtain surfaces in which the process of realization remains visible. Scratches, overlays, transparencies, and sudden chromatic concentrations thus preserve the memory of the painting gesture itself.
From figurative experiences and important commissions of his long career to contemporary abstract research, Maurizio Castagna’s path thus appears as a continuous transformation of the relationship between image and matter. His works, today also present in Italian and European private collections, attest to a research that does not deny its past, but uses it as a foundation for increasingly free and immediate painting.
In Unstable Attraction this long experience converges into a surface in which chaos is not simply represented, but organized and at the same time reexamined. The work seems to linger for an instant in a system of forces before a new transformation: a provisional balance in which every form attracts the other and no center can remain still.