Castagna Maurizio 1961 - XL - Archeologia dell'Anima

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 earthy ochre background, as if a wall worn by time, a humanoid presence emerges that is never fully revealed. The figure appears and at the same time dissolves: energetic blacks, reds, deep blues, and sudden green accents overlay scratches, grids, 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.
Spirals and radial structures, recurring elements in Castagna’s research, take on here the value of enigmatic coordinates: they evoke time, movement, origin, and that continuous tension between order and chaos that runs through his production. The subject is therefore not merely the represented figure, but the process itself of its surfacing.
The work sits within the continuity of the artist’s long exploration of the human condition, memory, and the possibility of making visible what belongs to the inner sphere. Matter does not form a backdrop, but preserves traces of what has been: Castagna idealistically digs into painting as one would dig into memory.
The artist
Maurizio Castagna has developed his painting practice over more than fifty years, after training at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin. Starting from figurative painting, he progressively developed a personal language in which figuration, abstraction, gesture, and material experimentation coexist.
Throughout his career he has also created important works of sacred and monumental character, including the Stoning 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 painting’s 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 the being.