Encouraged by her success with private collectors in France, Patrizia Castaldi is, for the first time, exhibiting her abstract paintings to the general public.
Her light yet refined line, her brightly pristine palette, her ability to combine geometries in her drawings, all testify to her previous experience in the figurative arts, that of a leading stylist and costume designer. Her first abstract work of importance is a unicum for her: a beautiful, Boccioni-like painting without a title, an extraordinary creative outburst made up of the bold, rapid brushstrokes typical of Futurist paintings, with a surprising use of whites and reds.
Two groups of works follow: one is composed of geometric compositions and, the other, abstract landscapes. In the first group, Castaldi’s abstractionism becomes an instrument not only for investigating clearly esthetic equilibria, but also for fathoming our interior equilibria; in the latter case her works vehicle a synthesis of genuine emotions, in which the brushstrokes describe the tight bond between man and woman, made up of love and sexuality, but also of continual physical and mental (ri)discoveries between individuals that are complementary and inseparable.
Castaldi’s geometries distance themselves from traditional canons – from the world of pure emotions and subjective interpretations – and play upon the strings of unashamed romanticism.
Triangle and circle, pyramid and sphere – which are the two sexes objectified – are freed from their rigorous fixity and assume the representation, in infinite combinations, of specific persons in specific moments. Through the discerning use of color, Castaldi’s works evoke memories that are tangible and even palpable, memories of encounters in magical places and of incredible games played out in fantastic spaces.
In her final works, Castaldi replaces her “geometrical solids” with supple and sinuous lines that evoke new landscapes of the soul, perhaps even subtle combinations of bodies and profiles which symbolically revisit acts of carnal union, ones in which modesty mingles with boldness. Her technique remains the same, oil on canvas; this gives vitality and dynamism to the surface of her works, as well as an absolutely metaphysical profoundness.
Of particular interest: the lunar landscapes with their stuccowork, “coagulating” in the suspended space of geometric solids Also the black moons with their “furious granularity” – betraying without a doubt the artist’s mysterious and continually evolving femininity. Patrizia Castaldi represents a noteworthy parenthesis in the world of contemporary art, which seems so tormented by the desire to surprise at any cost, even to the point of appearing overly contrived. What prevails in Castaldi’s paintings, instead, is a desire for immediate order and this is obtained by the simple certitudes that her geometric lines confer, even when they are playfully combined, as is often the case.
Her paintings are clothed in crystalline light and communicate to the onlooker a spontaneity which is as fresh as it is unusual; and that spontaneity is able to reveal our most secret fantasies and desires. In this way, Patrizia Castaldi’s explosive femininity goes beyond so-called abstractionism “for its own sake” and converts it into a true language of the emotions, capable of disclosing the infinite.
Clara P. Natoli