Luciano Castelli (* 1951, Lucerne) is u.a. Painter, graphic artist, photographer, sculptor. In 1978 Castelli moved to Berlin. With Rainer Fetting and Salomé, he entered the history of art with his expressive painting as Neue Wilde. In 1989 he settled in Paris and married Alexandra in 1991, whom he painted again and again. He experiments with a homemade Camera Obscura and develops his revolving revolving paintings. Depending on the hanging you can see other faces, bodies or cityscapes. Luciano Castelli faced the interview IN|DEEDS in November 2017.
Two sentences to your Vita.
My creative roots are in Lucerne, where I was born in 1951 and which I left for Berlin in 1978, whose wild years I spent in the group of “Young Wild”, 1988 I got to know my wife Alexandra and mother of my two children, what led my way to Paris. We have been living in Switzerland for the first time a few years ago.
What are you most worried about at the moment? What’s on your mind? And can you share the intention of your art with us?
As you can see from a part of my pictures, the situation of our world is very important to me. Inspired by the multicultural complexity and the colorful coexistence of the metropolis of Paris, my revolving paintings emerged. The diversity of the body and life on the canvases, in part, acquire an abstract dimension and intend to read the picture from several points of view. By turning the paintings, changing, multiple views, characterize and reflect all the multicultural realities and challenges facing our society today.
At the same time, my works radiate a certain lightness that we should not lose. Tenderness and eroticism play a big role, because ….
How do you protect yourself from too much inspiration in this day and age?
I’ve been working in art since the beginning with my own person, my feelings, my immediate environment in relation to my life, no matter what topic I am working on it is almost always my person the way an actor gets into a role and the respective one History lives. So I can say that I myself am my guide.
How did you come to art? Why art?
My dad was a typographer and had a promotional studio, I grew up between pots of paint and he used every free minute to draw with my siblings and myself. As a teenager, I experimented in my drawings, collages, objects and photographs with a variety of materials such as mica, sequins and feathers. These first works were then discovered by Jean-Christophe Ammann, the then director of the Kunstmuseum Lucerne.
What makes you happy right now? What are you currently afraid?
My family and the development of my work makes me happy. The terror situation worldwide scares me, and the famine in the world makes me sad!
How do you assess the current development of the art market?
Unfortunately, the actual values of art are becoming more and more in the background.
The word market actually says it, we produce well-designed stocks.
Two sentences about your current project.
I seek to renew, free and develop painting, to blow up the narrow frame of the stretcher and to open up new dimensions, to create a certain kind of abstraction with Figuration. In order to break out of the conventional frame of the picture presentation, on the one hand, I let the canvas become part of a whole, of a larger picture or, as here in the Jandorf department store, merge exclusively on walls, columns, ceilings and let structural structures merge with the painting. As in the case of the “Revolving Paintings”, some pictures are opened only at a certain angle, since they are distributed over several wall sections.
“From White to White” in the Jandorf was also about transience, the course of things that drive us today and tomorrow look or be interpreted differently or even completely disappear.
What are your (next) goals?
My next project is the photography, which will be on display in 2018 at the Leica Museum in Wetzlar.
My goal:
Always a seeker to stay!
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