Originality and repetition
Anna Miotto, September 2015
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The work by Orianne Castel is a perfect example of art in our century, with roots firmly placed on the avant-garde image of the grid. The grid appeared in the early twentieth century, first in France and then in Russia and Holland, and is the emblem of modernist philosophy in the field of visual arts (just think of works by artists such as: Malevic, Léger, Mondrian, Picasso and Schwitters in the first half of the twentieth century and Albers, Martin and Reinhardt in the second half).
Orianne Castel adopts this image as a paradigm of contemporaneity; it is an image that is timeless and always recognisable, yet at the same time a unique opportunity for the artist to work on an endless process of imitation.
Adopting Krauss’s concept of grid as structure that does not lay bare but, through repetition, conceals, Orianne Castel sees in it an opportunity for construction and evolution.
The artist plays with this structure and its intrinsic properties, both spatial and temporal.
From a spatial point of view the grid is in fact two-dimensional, geometric and ordered. This rigour is clear in Orianne’s work and gives the feeling of choice: not imitation, but aesthetic decision. In temporal terms the grid acts as the emblem of modernity, for the very fact of being one of the ever-present forms in the art of our century. Orianne Castel is fully aware of this and it is not by chance that she openly declares that she feels a bond with the American artist Agnes Martin, as demonstrated by her vision of the grid as myth, not in the sense of tale, but as fusion between paradox and contradiction. In other words she uses the structure to represent reality, but at the same time inevitably falls back into the field of the two-dimensional and of geometric order.
A window which opens onto the external world, which links up with what is outside. I think that the image of the window truly epitomises Orianne Castel’s work, since it assumes the intrinsic characteristics of the object: it reflects, fixes and captures and then transmits.
The artist herself declares that she wants to create a direct link with the environment around the gallery: the dock. Based on the etymology of the word dàrsena, as place of construction and work, the work by Orianne closely connects the external environment and the gallery space, her place of experiment and creation. It clearly reveals her replication of those regular, ordered structures, broken up by horizontal and vertical lines, which characterise the metal buildings of the shipyard.
It is significant that the artist accomplished the work with three measuring instruments used in the building trade: the line marker, the plumb line and the measuring square.
The entire work is characterised by the decision to use blue, which relates perfectly both to the white cube space of the gallery and to the shipyard.
A site-specific work which incorporates a mix of painting and sculpture. There is the color in the series of six panels resting against the wall and the use of string and geometric rigour in Grille, which seems to recapture the minimalist sculpture of the Sixties.
Not by chance are the artist’s points of reference the painter Agnes Martin and the sculptor Fred Sandback.
The work is both landscape and architecture, as in Japanese gardens. A ying and a yang perfectly united and complementary. A union between art and reality
Orianne Castel 