Marcello Castellani (1989 Cali, Colombia) displays unraveling portraits as if their tissue was made of wool, the eyes and the mouth keep a certain dignity but the rest is part of a transmutation that takes the figure to another level of existence, abstract shapes, and figurative painting merge into a surreal whole that is both moving on the surface and in the surrounding space of the canvas. His portraits question the viewer about his very own existence while witnessing form being destroyed and taken out of its usual appearance. The same abyss of solitude and anxiety reflected upon the mirror by any of us is now embodied as a being taken from another world, made of oil and canvas, serving the artist's intention, showing vague signs of hope for humankind in an overwhelming digital area. Castellani is an artist embedded in the rush and struggle of life, taking his portraits and figures to move out of the limited two dimensions of the canvas, away from the coldness of the wall bearing his heavy canvases full of energetic brushstrokes and loads of oil, the result of his fearless search for mistake and accident as a valid artistic procedure (as the only artistic procedure), as the way of finding new roads for his creative impulses. Nevertheless, after all the effort required to destroy the figure, the likeness of the model remains, his essence kept as a memory fading and vanishing from this world, dying and living at the same time. changing and moving. like we all are.
