Never before have we been in such a state of entanglement. We are caught up in the weeds, sinking in the silt, we are in each other’s cells, we are contaminated. The world inundates us, engulfs us, fills our pores and lungs, like a temperature, like air. Everywhere we turn there is oil in the water. Is this feeling an absorption within our own environment? A dissolution? Could this be a kind of love? Is there love in it?
Barthes writes of the desire of the lover to be engulfed, a desire for annihilation that can occur in either despair or fulfillment: “I am dissolved, not dismembered; I fall, I flow, I felt. Such thoughts—grazed, touched, tested (the way you test the water with your foot)—can recur. This is exactly what gentleness is.”1 A strange gentleness, this dabbling with the abyss, to dip one’s toe into the water and submit to dissolution.
The grounds of Guglielmo Castelli’s paintings can barely be called grounds. They are more like fluids: relative substances of the flower-strewn river where Ophelia floats to her death in the painting by John Everett Millais, or of the scintillating waters in Pierre Bonnard’s bathtubs. The eye swims, accompanied by all manner of materials and elements: daisies, lace, streaks of fat, soil, tongues, patterned carpets, and twinkling lights. This substance has an amniotic quality that allows figures to emerge from it as though they were grown and nourished there, suspended in and shaped by their liquid home.
“Boneless,” Castelli has called the figures in his paintings, adding that they are also survivors.2
A Lover’s Discourse: Guglielmo Castelli with works by Simone Leigh, chosen by Castelli, installation view, Aspen Art Museum, 2023. Photo: Nik House.
We are in a scene like a closed set: a tight, walled garden, tucked behind a gray stone house with no windows. Overhead the lilac skies are darkening, and shadows are creeping towards us down the mountains on the horizon. The garden is a sickly green color with a spiraling structure that threatens to suck the garden underground. It is studded with tiny flowers and plants, and edged by trees with fastidious topiary. It might be a circular prison or a toxic Eden, inhabited by three figures instead of the traditional Biblical pair, all of indeterminate gender. Each figure wears prim little pointed shoes and dainty socks that seem too small—a regular costume choice for Castelli’s characters. It is as though they have been forced to squeeze their feet into them, forcing their bodies to bloom excessively from the ankles upwards, as though in rebellion. They appear to be formed from the same substance and palette as the garden. This is all they have, the closed circuit, complete entanglement. Their only way out of their trap is to use what is already there.
One figure seems to be entering the garden from the house, the other exiting. In the center, a third, central figure stands, with a face pinched in concentration and arms raised above their head as though pulling something with invisible cords. Around their waist is a spinning hula hoop lit with flames, from which they seem to be conjuring a green ectoplasmic ball of magic, which shimmers with white cellular forms and is speckled with brown material. Is there an eye inside it? It looks like the possibility of a protean, new world, drawn from the raw ingredients of the polluted substance that they inhabit: from oil, rot, and mold.
Castelli once injured his leg and had cause to take medication that would dilute his blood. It made him wonder if he could do the same for his paintings.
Barthes: “I dilute myself, I swoon in order to escape that density, that clogging which makes me into a responsible subject.”3
A second scene has the color of tobacco, stained wood, and amber light. Now, three figures are together inside a vitrine, resembling a fin di siècle store display, a fish tank, or a museum diorama. The three are so close to one another now, that the boundaries between the bodies are blurred, their hips and buttocks and legs flow into one another in a kind of dance. There is also a flow of forms like genitals, fluids, organs, not belonging to any individual but all of them, as one. They have succumbed to complete and total co-dependency, co-embodiment, ecstasy. Is this the paradise that they built for themselves, from their Edenic prison? Is this a love like fusion, a soft annihilation, a euphoria? But this too, cannot last. The disappearance of the self into others is the lover’s fantasy. For these boneless bodies, like liquid dolls, have more recombining and reforming to do, and they belong to their environment as much as to one another. In the foreground of the scene an eerie hand with a sharp knife approaches, which seems destined to cut the lovers apart. But they are survivors. They will not be lost in each other forever, will not be annihilated, but will split and swim. To continue to constitute new worlds in which to survive, from the old one. That is all we have.
The fourth presentation of ‘A Lover’s Discourse’ featuring Guglielmo Castelli with works by Simone Leigh was on view at the Aspen Art Museum from October 20–December 10, 2023. Read more about the exhibition here.
Laura McLean-Ferris is a writer and curator based in Turin, Italy.
