Guglielmo Castelli: “Turin Is a City That Embraces, Challenges and Protects Me”

Guglielmo Castelli – The Archivio Carol Rama invited me to imagine a dialogue with her work, and it struck me as an extraordinary opportunity, also as a moment of exchange with Turin, my city. Carol Rama has always been a turning point for me, a “recalculation” in the sense of a reformulation of my convictions. Discovering her work was like a new spring. The title, “La libertà dei piromani”, arrived like a sudden explosion. It is linked to that interview, but also to the fact that an artist like Carol Rama had to resist all her life. There is a saying that if you can make it in Turin, you can make it anywhere. Turin has its own particular pace of absorbing things, for people as much as for the city itself. It is a city where time is also bound up with space: it is laid out on a grid, so you never get lost. That is also what “recalculation” means: an idea you can keep in balance and that, even when it tips over, you can always find again. Carol Rama had to fight enormously. I don’t know if you ever visited her house: she had almost walled herself up inside it.

I have always imagined it more as the stomach of an animal than as a ship, something that breathes in and out, that brings things back up and out again. It was a very dark house. She said she needed to shut herself in because the outside world would not let her concentrate. Hence the idea of a matryoshka inside another matryoshka, and of these little matches. Setting fire to things is also a violent gesture, but I believe art must have that urgency, an almost animal instinct. Carol had it, together with incredible grace and talent. I remember she had put her Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement on a small table, somewhat off to one side, saying: “I put it at the back because they gave it to me too late, they should have given it to me sooner”. When I came across her work I immediately felt an affinity: an affinity in divergence, in analysis, in attempts at living. Her life was certainly harder than mine, marked by the early loss of very close family ties. But above all I found her analysis of the body fundamental: its fragmentation, the body that becomes a prosthesis, an accessory through which something can be rebuilt. It is a reflection that profoundly shaped my idea of feeling and what I would go on to develop in my research. In this exhibition, for example, there will be no paintings. It was essential for me to create a cacophony of languages: works on paper, collages, embroidery, a large textile. I didn’t want to reach the second stage of elaboration, which for me is painting, but to remain in the more instinctive dimension of drawing. Drawing is the first time. Of course you can erase and reformulate, but it keeps something immediate. It is a kind of “velvet violence”, something that sets off without knowing exactly where it will end up, with a particular impetuousness and authenticity. I believe the only way to approach Carol’s work, even just to brush against it, was precisely through drawing, together with collage, including on fabric.

GC – Actually, no. When the invitation arrived I already had five works ready, two of which came about precisely while looking at Carol’s work.

GC – I think the role of artists is also to stand at the bow with a match in hand – the match again – to light up spaces. Some shed more light, some less, but there is this ability to sense things before they fully emerge. And in my case, Carol is a constant presence.

GC – It comes back, in part, to the idea of “recalculation”. Through my training, and also by good fortune, I have always sensed that by exploring territories seemingly far from my most immediate interests I would find material to gather, mix and transform. As if I could keep enlarging that stomach where everything flows in and is reworked. I come from a city where Arte Povera remains, fortunately, a fundamental cultural reference, but it has never been at the centre of my interests. I observed and studied it, looking above all for its less obvious aspects. For me Arte Povera was not so much Mario Merz as Marisa Merz: her drawings, her sculptures, her way of working things through. My training went in that direction too. I didn’t study painting, but theatre. I was trying to understand how to hold together the porticoes, the Baroque, the almost de Chirico-like piazzas of Italy. Everything flowed into a kind of storehouse from which elements keep emerging, transformed. As a figurative painter, perhaps you find a voice of your own, or you keep looking for it. Personally, I hope never to find it completely. I prefer to imagine an overall score in which things enter, fall away, transform and are constantly reformulated. Turin also has an extraordinary gift: a culture of work, of making. I am an artist, but in some respects I also see myself as a craftsman. Technical work and daily engagement with materials help to cut down to size the sometimes illusory glitter of contemporary art. I am in the studio every day, often at absurd hours, like so many of my colleagues.

But it is precisely through making that doubt is nourished, and doubt generates further doubt. I am reminded of something I heard in an interview with Anne Carson, who reworked Descartes as “dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum”.

GC – In practical terms, everything starts with drawing. As you could see in the exhibition “Inserzioni” at Castello di Rivoli, I work a great deal through notebooks, pocketbooks and sketchbooks. Part of that material evaporates, while what remains condenses on the canvas, in a second stage. I discovered fairly late that I have a form of dyslexia, at times quite pronounced, and reading helped me find sounds, a way of telling stories through images as well. Set design mattered precisely because it starts from stories. Other people’s stories have always fascinated me: what happens, and the different ways it can be represented. In this sense theatre matters, but so does cinema. I graduated in theatre set design, but the Accademia in Turin offered a very broad training that also covered set design for television and film. I was able to experiment with different materials and settings. I knew I probably wouldn’t become a good set or costume designer, but the chance to touch, observe and compare different materials is something I brought into painting. What interests me above all is the expansion of pictorial space, the physical space that separates the body from the canvas. That is where many things happen. In moving towards and away from the painting, in what the eye manages to catch, a narrative takes shape. My body and my muscle memory create a kind of chromatic labyrinth from which images emerge. For me it is essential always to try to stay on the edge, in the instant before breaking point. I am interested in the idea of the curve, of bending, of what happens just before something snaps. This is also where the sometimes claustrophobic spaces of my paintings come from, in which bodies strain and try to survive.

GC – What interests me most is understanding what the next painting will be like. Not so much seeking novelty in what I depict, but in how I depict it: digging into painting with painting itself. I want one pictorial doubt to generate another, without folding back on itself. I am an Italian painter and I have chosen to stay in Italy. Camilleri wrote that if you leave your place by choice rather than necessity, that space will end up being occupied by the very thing you are running away from. I decided to stay because I believe there is a history here, and materials and forces to bring into relation, without any need for a forced fascination with everything foreign. Painting, for me, is the skeleton key with which I try to understand how things work.

GC – Luigi Fassi had the brilliant idea of bringing Laura Accerboni, a poet I greatly admire, into dialogue with a number of artists who live and work in Turin. Meeting Laura was extremely interesting. She works with words and, if it is true that the words we choose describe the world we want to live in, I try to do something similar through images, proceeding by extrapolation. It mattered that we met not in an exhibition but in the studio, a place also made of unfinished images, attempts that don’t always find a destination. Together we tried to intuit images and information, while she drew out words that were still taking shape. It was a very light encounter, almost like a breeze. Laura was curious to understand how I handle materials and what my working process is. We talked a lot about the ruthlessness of children’s play, a theme that often recurs in my research. Childhood is also a space of cruelty, of trial and discovery, in confronting oneself and others. The project also includes a talk with Sara Enrico and Marzia Migliora, together with Laura Accerboni, at the Circolo dei Lettori.

GC – First of all, the fact that I have a life here, made of loved ones, friendships and habits. I am very much a creature of habit. I have a deeply nostalgic relationship with Turin. I hold very vivid memories of scents, of my nose pressed against shop windows, of a past that of course will not return. It is a city that held on for a long time to its workshops, its small shops, a rhythm all its own. For me Turin is a city that embraces, challenges and protects me. There is a sense of work that flows like the river running through it, something that belongs to its DNA, to the history of a city built also by working people.

If you walk at a certain hour of the morning and stop to look at the friezes on the buildings, you discover that the light turns them gold. I am not only talking about architectural beauty, but about a scent, a season, something I can’t even define: the city’s ability to keep you company. Turin offers great cultural variety, but it keeps a human scale. It is a good place to live. It has a beauty that also lets you stand still, without having to explain yourself. At a time when it seems necessary to have an opinion on everything, in Turin you can stop in Piazza San Carlo, or in a side street, look around for five minutes and do nothing else. You look up and always discover something new.

It is the city of Carol Rama and Carlo Mollino, who lived on the same street, one opposite the other, without knowing they were neighbours. They sent each other invitations and notes to arrange to meet, without realising they lived practically across the street from each other.

GC – The Pinacoteca Agnelli, of course, and the major exhibition devoted to Marisa Merz, spread across three venues: the Fondazione Merz, GAM and Castello di Rivoli. And then, absolutely, Nan Goldin at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.

GC – I’m thinking of Bar, a young gallery that is doing excellent research-led work. I saw Lidia Silvestri’s exhibition there, a project I found very beautiful.

GC – I don’t think it’s obvious, but I would certainly say the Teatro Regio, because it lets you discover two very strong sides of the city. After walking through the historic centre and seeing Palazzo Carignano, where Italy was born, you enter a space designed by Carlo Mollino, with a purple auditorium you would never expect to find in a theatre. It is completely different from the image of the bourgeois Turin drawing room. And then I would recommend a morning walk among the farmers’ stalls at the Balôn, between fruit, vegetables and flowers. Walking without the obligation to be constantly stimulated, letting yourself go, getting a little lost. Turin has a dimension that still grants you the luxury of doing that.

I prefer the wonder of the little, or of the “almost”, to the presumption of whole things.

Images:

1. Guglielmo Castelli. Photo: Alberto Nidola.

2. Guglielmo Castelli, Lingua sbrigliata, collage, crayons, embroidery on fabric, 150x160cm. Courtesy: The artist, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo / Brussels / New York / Paris, and Sylvia Kouvali, London / Piraeus. Photo: Nicola Morittu.

3. Guglielmo Castelli, Senza titolo, collage and oil on paper, 42x41cm, 2023. Courtesy: The artist, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo / Brussels / New York / Paris, and Sylvia Kouvali, London / Piraeus. Photo: Nicola Morittu.

4, 5. Guglielmo Castelli, Inserzioni, Castello di Rivoli, 2025. Courtesy: The artist, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo / Brussels / New York / Paris, and Sylvia Kouvali, London / Piraeus. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano.

6, 7. Details from Guglielmo Castelli Studio, Turin, 2026. Photo: Alberto Nidola.

8, 9. Guglielmo Castelli and Fabio Cherstich, Sospeso nel moto con addebito di vuoto, San Carlo Cremona, 2026. Courtesy the artists, San Carlo Cremona, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo | Brussels | New York | Paris, and Sylvia Kouvali, London | Piraeus. Photo: Form Group – Andrea Rossetti.