In his first solo exhibition at Mendes Wood DM’s São Paulo gallery, Guglielmo Castelli presents a recent body of paintings that feature burlesque and circus-like characters — mutating, distorted figures rendered in fluid, diluted, and luminous brushstrokes. Drawing from a wide array of narrative, historical, and iconographic sources, Castelli treats the canvas, the material support of painting itself, as a site of imaginative experimentation and fabulation. The show comprises fourteen paintings — one of which delves into the threshold between painting and sculpture —and an immersive room with a raised cruciform platform, where four large-scale oil paintings are displayed flat on the ground, one in each quadrant.
Upon entering the exhibition, two allegorical works greet the viewer: on the concave face of a curved wall, Castelli presents a painting about daytime; on the opposite, convex side, an homage to the night — Meia-dia and Meia-noite (both 2024), respectively. Each work is painted on the stretched leather of a tambourine, using the instrument’s membrane as the support for mystical images. The skin, taut over the strainer, functions like canvas on a stretcher, while the rusted jingles act as part of a whimsical, spirited frame. The play between the wall’s concave and convex sides mirrors the duality of the tambourines’ inner and outer surfaces — the same happens with masks, a recurring motif in Castelli’s works, such as Strong curls, happy years (2024) — also evoking symbolic opposites that shape cultural constructs, legends, and mystical traditions: sun and moon, day and night, gleam and murk, body and soul. These two small, delicate works reveal Castelli’s sensitive erudition in drawing from a symbolic arc that underpins his narrative intentions, as if the universe could be contained between two tambourines, and all sound emerges not when the instrument is still but when it is in motion.
In Meia-dia (2024), three elongated pilgrims wander through a florid path. As seen in other paintings, Castelli dialogues intimately with ubiquitous cultural expressions and images from the history of Brazilian art, and here it seems like a reverberation, even if indirect, recalling the vibrant flower fields and butterflies painted by Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato (1990–1995) in the 1980s. The pilgrims carry butterfly nets, as if attempting to catch the elusive scarlet light of the midday sun. The figures exhibit the kind of sinuous, dance-like movement typical of Castelli’s paintings, conveying an almost trance-like visual narrative. In the companion piece, Meia-noite (2024), the artist further distorts his figures within a nocturnal blue scene. Here, the tambourine’s metal jingles are painted a paler gold, as if bathed in moonlight. A prone figure appears to study a transparent plastic bag containing a goldfish, the multiple refracted images on the water’s surface contrasting with its projection on the bag’s curved membrane.
The lighting of the paintings in the exhibition, precisely angled via spotlight, creates dramatic pauses between works and accentuates the theatrical character of Castelli’s practice —not only in the staging of his paintings in space, but also in the composition of the scenes themselves. It’s no coincidence that Filippo Juvarra (1678–1736) and Benedetto Alfieri (1699–1767) — renowned scenographers from Castelli’s hometown of Turin — come to mind. Castelli also received academic training in stage design there. The exhibition’s title, “Um galo sozinho não tece uma manhã” — which could bluntly be translated to “One rooster alone does not weave a morning,” since the artist chose to keep it in the original Brazilian Portuguese — is taken from a poem by Brazilian writer João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920–1999). It refers to the fact that one voice is not strong enough to start a revolution; many are needed. The author was, indirectly, encouraging a collective uprising during the Brazilian military dictatorship. One might imagine the show as a series of oneiric visuals for a theatrical adaptation of that poem fragment, staged at the Teatro Regio Torino, with all the movement and drapery of Italian late-Baroque theatricality.
The rooster mentioned by Melo Neto and other references to Brazilian artistic culture emerge more explicitly in Moleque (2024). Set against a chrome yellow background, an infantile trickster figure — a kind of unmasked, mischievous Italian lazzo — appears to be tying someone up or trapping them underfoot. In the upper-right corner, a rooster with flamboyant plumage crows, while in the opposite corner, two street dogs play (or fight). The insistent use of Brazilian Portuguese in the title, a word popularly used to refer to a mischievous young boy, further roots the painting in Brazil, reinforced by the presence of colorful paper flags reminiscent of Alfredo Volpi’s (1896–1988) paintings, and by the exaggerated perspective of a road that recedes forcefully into the center of the canvas, evoking the compositions of José Antonio da Silva (1909–96).
Direct and focused lighting, casting defined shadows, is also a feature in works like Broken heart melody (2024), in which anthropomorphic clips pin a human figure to a metallic tray. On the back wall, the clips’ shadows resemble sentinels, guardians of sleep, or chessboard pawns. In the large-scale painting Oh after, after (2024), the interplay of multiple vanishing points, perspectives, and scales evokes the fanciful and prodigious spirit of eighteenth-century Italian capricci, where disparate subjects, styles, and elements are layered together in an imaginary plane, shaped by the distortions, exaggerations, and miniaturizations of a mental labyrinth.
Distortion — an essential phenomenon for how Castelli sees the world, but also a key formal strategy for compositions — extrapolates into the very supports of two remarkable works. In Imitação da forma (2024), the standard right edge of a rectangular painting is pushed outward by a protruding circular section. A similar maneuver happens in the astonishing Glorious wrecks (2024), in which a painted silhouette on paper slouches limply over a tiny wooden ladder. Here, Castelli playfully scrambles conventional notions of painting’s two-dimensionality and sculpture’s three-dimensionality, giving material form to his ongoing exploration of distortion.
Castelli is very attentive to the observer’s experience: navigating the exhibition feels like being involuntarily magnetized by a rhythmic choreography planned by the artist. This phenomenological centrality is also evident in the special room with a raised platform where, after climbing a ramp, the visitor is placed on a high level, having a kind of aerial view — or the vision of someone who can fly — of the figures in the four large canvases that are placed on the floor. They compose a mirabilia of his universe: against the white background of the canvas, these shapes seem like cutouts arranged on white paper, ready to interact with each other like a lexicon within Castelli’s pictorial narratives.
