He was invited to the first edition of “Inserzioni”, the exhibition open until February Rivoli Castle, curated by director Francesco Manacorda and inspired by the “Ouverture” which inaugurated the first contemporary art museum in Italy over 40 years ago. At Mauto you can see his work “Sempre Aperto Teatro” in “News from the Near Future”, the 30th anniversary exhibition of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation. He is present at Gam in the “Third Resonance”, close to Carol Rama, and, for a few more days, in “Fata Morgana”, the collective exhibition on the relationship between the visible and the invisible organized in Milan at Palazzo Morando by the Trussardi Foundation. Guglielmo Castelli, born in 1987, born in Turin, the city where he lives and works, and who confesses to “loving madly”, is the Turin artist of 2025, by choice of the editorial staff of Republic.
His works explore themes such as childhood and the staging of the human figure, with its shadows and fragility. Castelli also made himself known on the international scene. In New York he had a solo exhibition at Mendes Wood two years ago and next year he will exhibit at the Kunsthalle in Vienna.
One of his debuts was in Turin in 2017, when in the Sala Reale of Porta Nuova, among the nineteenth-century paintings of Francesco Gonin, he presented “Asomatognosia”, at the center of which was the isolation of some parts of the human body and an idea of mutation and change in the transition to adulthood. He had already been to Rivoli in 2022, called for the project “Expressions with Fractions” by the then director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who had purchased his triptych “Adult Games” for the Castle collections at the 2020 Rome Quadrennial. Now he has returned with a series of works entitled “…and this story that has no meaning, is like putting wine in the laundry, it’s like saying goodnight to the wall, and then brushing your teeth with cyanide”.
A title that reveals, he admits, his training as a set designer at the Albertina Academy: «The emphasis on the word creates imagery, refers to the scenes. It’s a nursery rhyme that seemed functional to the idea of the exhibition. It seems made for children, but in reality it is caustic, it alludes to childhood, where everything begins, for better or for worse.”
Then he moved on to painting, but without forgetting the theatre: «I have always approached things that seemed distant to me. After the first contacts with galleries, including the Roman one “Il Segno”, I understood that painting could be a job for me. Now I absolutely feel like a painter, or rather a finder for a painting that partly traces back to a symbolist alphabet. I try to combine elements characterized by a melancholy aesthetic, to create a chaos of objects in which the tension before the break, the possibility of a fall, does not disappear.”
The idea of the stage remains, but with the limits imposed by the two-dimensionality of the canvas: «Painting must be limited, it takes time. I like to fill the picture. Things happen there, the body emerges with disordered behaviors, Something that attracts and repels.”
How was it returning to Castello di Rivoli? «When Francesco called me, I felt an immense emotion. I felt honoured. If you can make it in Turin, you can make it everywhere. This is a difficult city, with its own austerity, where there was a high artistic and cultural level.” Castelli created a series of works for the occasion, also returning the sketches and notebooks. Does the comparison with Arte Povera persist when you exhibit at Rivoli? «I have studied it and I recognize its foundations, I especially love Marisa Merz. But at a certain point to grow up you have to kill your father and mother.”
Are you attracted to artificial intelligence? «Look, I recognize the possibilities, but I really don’t care. I’m nostalgic. I claim the possibility to dream and make mistakes in my own way.” In 2017-2018 he was in Berlin for an artist residency. «I could have stopped there, or gone to the other sidere parts. But I wanted to return to my city, to give it back something of what it gave me, knowing that it too knows how to give back. You won’t get lost in its square layout. I am proud and happy to be in Turin, I bought a house here.”
