Interview: Award-winning Art Director Gaetano Castelli in Rome

Where the real and imaginary meet: artist, creative director and set designer, Professor Gaetano Castelli with one of his paintings at his studio in Rome, Italy. Portrait by Paul McDonnell. Click on pictures for full-screen slideshow

One of Italy’s great designers, artist Professor Gaetano Castelli was Director General of Rome's Academy of Fine Arts and works on Italy’s top television programs including the latest show by Oscar-winning Roberto Benigni & 18 Sanremo Music Festival extravaganzas plus winning the Rose D’Argento and two Rose d’Oro awards at the Montreux International Television Festival. Today, he is the creative director of the spectacular, multi-million dollar stage shows at Paris’ Moulin Rouge. Jeanne-Marie Cilento talks to the gallant and enthusiastic designer at his studio in Rome


View across to Villa Medici from the Castelli Studio

STROLLING through the great walnut doors of a grand palazzo in Rome’s elegant Via Margutta you enter another world. The city’s cacophony of people and cars disappear as you are enveloped by a green sanctuary of tall trees and gardens ringed by stately baroque buildings. Like a village within the city, this sanctuary was the place where Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck filmed Roman Holiday and today is home to film studios, offices and apartments.

Castelli & Associati is so hidden away up among steep, winding stairs, stone pathways and flowering trees that someone is always dispatched to meet visitors and lead them through this beautiful haven. Today, it is Manuel Bellucci taking me from the enormous entrance courtyard through the gardens to the studio.

Talented designers Chiara Castelli, Gigi Sabbatella & Manuel Bellucci

Inside, the mezzanine space is a hive of activity as the studio team work on their many projects which range from theatre to television and fashion to architectural projects. Chiara Castelli, Gaetano’s beautiful blond daughter, oversees the studio and is a trained artist and designer herself. Like her father who was the director and a professor at Rome's Accademia di Belle Arti, she also taught there as well as working at the studio alongside talented designers Manuel Bellucci and Luigi Sabbatella.

When Professor Gaetano Castelli arrives, he has a commanding presence tempered by a natural charm and grace and perfect manners. Below his leonine mane, he has the smooth, year-round tan and fitness of the avid tennis player. Once we are at his desk, he speaks about his work with great passion in his signature gravelly voice. He travels across the world for his work and seems to spend half of his time on planes visiting projects from Paris to Macao where a new version of the Moulin Rouge show will open in 2016.

Gaetano Castelli with his wife Gail Milissa Grant 

Married to soigné American writer and former diplomat, Gail Milissa Grant, the United States has also become a frequent stop in his peripatetic life. The couple have a beautiful home in the heart of Rome which displays some of Professor Castelli’s paintings which have been exhibited in Italy and London.

Growing up in Rome, Gaetano Castelli knew from an early age he was interested in art. His father was an art director and his mother was one of the first women in Italy to work at a bank. “When I was a young boy my uncle suggested I become an accountant,” he says. “But I realized I was made for an artistic career. My mother helped me to follow my dream, she said to me ‘I want you to do what I could not do which is to follow what you love'.”

Minimalist set for Roberto Benigni's 10 Commandments, December 2014 

Professor Castelli’s career bloomed immediately as he began not only teaching but also working as an assistant set designer on television shows. “I started teaching and working in TV at the same time. I began to teach when I was very young at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. By the time I was 24 I had already started creating the sets for major television shows and I was travelling across Italy to work especially to Florence and Torino." 

 A dramatic moving set for the TV program Fantastico 1980-90 

His career took off as he became the art director for Italy’s highly popular Saturday evening variety shows. “I was art directing most of the Saturday variety programs at the Teatro Delle Vittorie such as Fantastico and Roberto Benigni’s shows. As a performer, Benigni captures the attention of viewers as he is a great entertainer and he is very expressive and satirical. He is not only talented by also a humble and sensitive person and always calls me personally to thank me for the design of his shows.

“I worked at the Teatro Delle Vittorie for 15 years when it was the peak of variety television in the 1980s. At that time, the Saturday night shows were a ritual for many people. They wanted to watch something interesting after dinner, commenting with family and friends, singing the songs and admiring the dancers.”

Sculptural creations for the TV program La Sai L'Ultima 1990-2000

Professor Castelli designed and created the sets for numerous other television shows including Canzonissima, Fantastico, La Sai L'Ultima, Carramba Che Sorpresa, Stasera Pago Io, Studio 80 and Palcoscenico along with the first news programs for Italy’s state broadcaster RAI and haute couture fashion events such as those for Rome’s Alta Moda as well as museum exhibitions.

Creating the streamlined design for TV show Fiorello in 2011

By the 1980s, Professor Castelli was also being asked to design the singing and dancing spectaculars for the famed Parisian theatres, the Lido and Moulin Rouge. Today, the Castelli team work for five years designing each multi-million dollar production creating not only the enormous and technically complex and elaborate sets and lighting but also every detail of the famed dancers’ costumes. Once the design of the Moulin Rouge shows are finished they are on stage in Paris for more than a decade.

Painting by Gaetano Castelli Rome, 2007

“In 1984, I started to work at Moulin Rouge and for the Lido. The new show for Moulin Rouge is set to open in 2017 and takes years of work to produce. It’s very important to create harmony between all of the different elements of the design from the lights to the costumes. Everything must work together to create the right atmosphere, there must be coherence in the lights, scene and costume.”

Gaetano Castelli has created beautiful drawings and paintings of costumes and his capacity to not only see the big picture of the set design but also to focus on every detail of the costumes is one of his outstanding talents. “I see the dresses of the dancers like pieces of architecture with particular lines, curves, perspectives and diagonals which are all designed to create a strong visual effect," he says. "I also try to imagine the face of the person who wears the costumes and express the soul of the dancer through the design. Costumes should make you dream.”

Designing the La Dolce Vita set for the Sanremo Music Festival in 2011

It is hard to overstate the importance of the historic Sanremo Music Festival as one of the biggest events on Italian television for more than sixty years. For a week in February, everyone watches and follows the show and the singers, if only to fiercely criticize them. The Castelli studio has worked on eighteen of them and each time Gaetano Castelli tries to come up with something new and outdo all of the previous shows.

A colourful retro design for the Sanremo Festival in 2004 

“Working on Sanremo I look back at what I have done to make sure that I don’t repeat the same look or theme again. And I keep up with the latest technology in computer programs and lighting so our designs are also cutting edge.”

A technically complex, clam-like shell featured at Sanremo 2012 

When he was the director at Rome’s Art Academy and teaching set design he worked with students from around the world and has travelled across Europe and China to take workshops on the art of graphic and set design.

“I love working with students from across the globe," he explains. "My advice to young designers is to be open to everything and prepared to work on a range of things from the set of a movie to designing a business card or the cover of a music album. It is important when you are young to start with small jobs not with something too big. The artist needs to emerge step by step and be appreciated and recognized for his talent then he gains the trust of great directors."

Hand-drawn sketch for the set of  TV program Rock Politik 

Set design has been very important in the history of theatre and opera since it was created on canvas and paper. "When I started, everything was still painted by hand and the set designer had to learn how to create small, important details that catch the attention of the audience," Professor Castelli says. "An art director must be very skilled in a lot of fields from painting, drawing, printing, perspective and be ready to also work without a computer. “

Painting by Gaetano Castelli Rome, 2005

Although the Castelli team use complex animation, graphic and engineering software to design colossal systems of lighting and moving sets, Professor Castelli prefers to create the original designs by drawing and painting.

“I don’t ever tire of my work and I always enjoy designing each new production,” he says today. “Whenever I go on holiday I really miss the work as it is very creative and gives you so much energy.”

Click on pictures for full-screen slideshow

Secret Rome: Atmospheric Quartiere Coppedè

DAM Gallery presents:

Photojournalist Christian Evren Gimotea Lozañes captures the looming Gothic apparition of the Quartiere Coppedè. Jeanne-Marie Cilento reports from Rome

EVEN on a sunny day with the Eternal City’s sapphire blue skies gleaming above, the quarter’s darker and more obscure corners have an ominous air. Dripping with stony ornament, towered buildings flank a long, low archway lit by an enormous wrought-iron chandelier that leads to the main square, Piazza Mincio. 

The extraordinary mix of Art Nouveau, Ancient Roman, Egyptian, Medieval and Renaissance motifs is the product of one prolific mind, the Florentine architect Gino Coppedè. In 1916, he was given an architect’s ideal project ~ the opportunity to design an entirely new residential quarter of Rome in Parioli. Given creative carte blanche by the clients, the architect allowed his imagination to run amok and designed an enclave more baroque in sensibility than even Bernini could dream up for 16th Century Rome.

Gino Coppedè was born in Florence in 1866 and began his career as a boy sculpting decorative pieces for furniture. Later he attended the Professional School of Industrial and Decorative Arts, graduating when he was twenty-four and becoming a member of the city's Academy of Fine Arts. The architect continued to work in Rome creating extraordinary buildings in the Quartiere Coppedè until 1927.

The original designs were not created for an eccentric millionaire but for a Ligurian building association to house the city’s growing professional class and civil servants. The stone carved winged serpents, monolithic eastern heads and putti that decorate the buildings all come from Gino Coppedè's youth when he worked in the wood carving studio of his father. 

Walking around the Quartiere Coppedè feels like being in a bizarre fairytale with it’s combination of Florentine towers and Venetian palaces decorated with mosaics and frescoes, Baroque Roman palazzi with real and imitation papal stemmata, sundials and even a building with ironwork and carvings in the form of musical notation. 

Today, forty-five different buildings from three to six stories high make up the Quartiere Coppedè. The mosaic-tiled archways, intricate brickwork, turrets, towers and loggias all create a unique architectural borgo amid one of Rome's most sober and wealthy residential suburbs. 

The Quartiere Coppede's central Piazza Mincio with it's massive Art Nouveau  fountain.

Completed in 1924, the Fontana delle Rane's dynamic figures and water creatures dominate Piazza Mincio. 

Full of movement and fantasy, the fountain's sculptures depict giant shells and water nymphs. 

Spouting head of the Fontana della Rane at the heart of the Coppede Quarter in Parioli

Facade showing architect Gino Coppede's extraordinary mix of architectural and historical motifs from the Roman Corinthian columns and Renaissance loggia to the Art Nouveau curling cast iron balcony and tiles.

Detail of the building's entrance with it's graphic black and yellow tiles, iron and glass lamp and panelled wooden doors.

The fantastical Villino delle Fate with it's mix of terracotta, cast iron and mosaic-tiled decoration. 

Detail of the facade of the Villino delle Fate designed by Florentine architect Gino Coppede and depicting Renaissance Florence including Brunelleschi's Duomo and the Palazzo delle Signoria.

The apartment buildings are decorated with Romanesque loggias, Liberty style ceramic tiles and Roman lion's heads and classical heads.

Looking up to the facade of the entrance building flanking the archway, it is covered in a riot of High Mannerist classical figures and heads carved in Travertine marble.

The street leading into the enclave of the Quartiere Coppede.

The enormous wrought-iron chandelier hanging below the archway at the entrance to the Quartiere Coppede.

Palazzo del Ragno built from Travertine marble, Roman bricks and wood and showing Coppede's combination of historical influences.

Garden terraces and apartments form part of the quarter's entrance archway and look out across Piazza Mincio

Palazzo Del Ragno designed and built between 1916-1924 and showing architect Gino Coppede's capacity to combine different materials such as brick, marble, stone and wood and historical motifs.

The great Travertine marble head above the doors leading into the Palazzo del Ragno

Travertine marble decorations carved to represent a winged griffin and stylised lion's head.

Detail of an elaborate corner balcony, the Grotesques carved in Travertine marble.  

DAM Gallery

New Exhibition: Artist America Martin's New Show in Los Angeles

Artist America Martin at her studio in LA: "My new work reflects what has been my most recent boon of solace: music, flowers, dirt, vines and growing things, and always the figure, the form.” 

 Los Angeles-based painter and sculptor America Martin’s new exhibition How the Sun Goes has opened at the JoAnne Artman Gallery, Jeanne-Marie Cilento & Raphael West report

 

 

Evening Bath 2015 Mixed media on cotton paper 

AMERICA Martin’s new show explores the themes and subjects dear to the artist’s heart including reclining female nudes and musicians at work.  Both the paintings and collages have her signature bold line and massive, solid figures. Inspired not only by early modernist painters but also by her Colombian background and her interest in indigenous culture, Martin’s work embodies a dynamism and joy that is rare in contemporary art today.

Old Vines 2015 Collage & ink

“Color and line are king," says the painter before the exhibition.“With color and line, a woman, a flower, the arc of the blue sky bending into night can be caught, held down by love and captured into a painting, a drawing, or a sculpture.” Martin says although the new series of works have similar themes, this time she is including new ways of working such as using mixed media on paper and collage. “The adventure began by cutting out paper and photographing the abstract shapes," she explains. “Taking these shapes to the computer…and ironing, flattening and melding them into compositions. I then sent these steam rolled images to a small artisan print house, and printed one image of each on 100% cotton rag paper. Then with oil, ink and pencil I re-find the stories and shapes to pull to the surface.” The outcome of this process has what Martin calls a “freshness, and flatness” and she says it is like making her own custom, coloured paper.

When the Moon Swims in the Sea 2015 Mixed media on paper

The other technique she uses in the new show is collage. For fifteen years, Martin has been going to Hiromi Paper in Santa Monica. “Hiromi has an amazing collection of papers from around the world, but mainly imports papers from Japan. These are the papers I work with. Some of these papers are made by monks; some are dyed by minerals found in the earth.”

The artist describes the process of creating her collage works: “I begin by holding a piece of paper in my hand and just look at it. Soon it will, to my muse’s eye, start to resemble a leaf, a wood plank or a woman’s neck. With a big pair of scissors, I begin cutting, I need not stop, or listen for the story, the subject is constant and it is there, in each piece of paper. It sings out saying ‘Hear I am this is my line.' Dorothy like, with her scarecrow, I put back together the parts, the pieces of paper, so that they resemble to the viewers' eye, what I already see in the quiet flat piece of paper.”

Martin has been painting with oil and acrylic on canvas since the beginning of her career and she says her way of working has subtly changed with her sweeping lines moving from the light and gestural to heavy and bold and the colors metamorphosing from dark to light. She says the paintings are like her diary and closely follow her life, becoming very personal pieces to her.

The artist at work on a large painting at her studio in LA

“I love the process of painting but it is the slowest,’’ she says. “Because I work with oil and acrylic it can take months for these materials to cure. My body of new work reflects what has been my most recent boon of solace: music, flowers, dirt, vines and growing things, and always the figure, the form.” Looking back today, Martin says her passion for painting began when she bought a book about Van Gogh at the age of nine years old. As a precocious child of Los Angeles, by ten she had already begun studying with Vernon Wilson at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Growing up in the Hollywood Hills, Martin continued this apprenticeship for the next eight years while attending the Crossroads School for the Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, California.


Women, Wind and Sea Flowers 2015 Oil & acrylic on canvas

After high school, she went on to study at the Boston Museum School and then moved back to Los Angeles. Martin soon began exhibiting and selling her work with other young artists and she was able to build up enough work to get the attention of art galleries. By starting to sell her work early, Martin was able to create a career in full-time painting in her twenties.
 

Hammock and Garden 2014-2015 Oil & acrylic on canvas

"This new show embraces the old and the new," the artist says. "Works done in collage, oil and acrylic on canvas and works done in mixed media on paper with the wonders of technology. I consider myself a very old school artist. Always drawn to the slow process ~ to things more classically inclined. At this time, I am not interested in the notion of editions or prints. I love the song of a single thing. I admire the reverence in unique one-of-a-kind creations. Each piece is done by my own hand and is an original."

How the Sun Goes: New Works by Colombian-American Artist America Martin at JoAnne Artman Gallery in Laguna Beach, California USA. The show runs from February 5th, 2015 until March 31st. For more information visit: www.joanneartmangallery.com

New Design: Scope By MA-Style Architects in Japan

"The large opening on the north side projects into the landscape and catches the changes of the season and daily weather, bringing in light and a feeling of the wind," say the architects.

Poised on a hill looking over tea plantations in Southern Japan, Scope is a sculptural new building designed by mA-style architects, reports Jeanne-Marie Cilento. Photographs by Kai Nakamura
 
DESIGNED as a giant viewfinder, the building has a jutting rectilinear snout that takes in the green swathes of the surrounding tea bushes. The house is compact ~ barely one hundred square metres ~ but has the strong presence of an abstract Henry Moore statue and the charisma of Le Corbusier’s small chapel at Ronchamp. The telescopic second level has a single glazed wall, like a lense, focusing all attention out to the brilliant emerald plants producing green tea that cover the Makinohara Plateau below.

Atsushi and Mayuma Kawamoto of mA-style architects wanted to create a contemporary new building in this small town in Shizuoka Prefecture. Sited high on a stone platform, Scope is resoundingly Modernist but has a certain grace of scale and lightness that prevents it dominating the landscape dotted with modest houses.

“We felt it was necessary for the client, who has lived in this area a long time, to design a building which could recapture the charm of the land afresh,’’ Atsushi Kawamoto explains. “The site consists of a tiered stone wall in a landslide prevention zone which is why we couldn't use the whole site for construction. We created the "telescope" form on the second level as a trapezoid because the view to the north is beautiful and the room spreads out in that direction."

Supported on two slanting volumes of exposed concrete, the second level’s horizontal viewfinder is rendered in a contrasting crisp white. "This large opening on the north side projects out into the landscape and catches the changes of the season and daily weather, bringing in light and a feeling of the wind," say the architects.

Entry to the house is through a covered courtyard created by the concrete walls. Inside, the light-filled entrance is bare apart from an elegant white spiral stair leading up to the main floor. The ground level houses a Japanese room and bathrooms that flank either side of the entry.

The curving stairway leads up to the top floor with several bedrooms and the spacious open plan living and dining room with its single expansive view across the tea plantations. Here, the interior has been kept to minimalist essentials with concrete floors, white walls and a pale, stream-lined kitchen.

“The internal space is simply organised so it is in harmony with the scenery outside,” Kawamoto says. “We can really create a rich experience by tying human beings and nature together through architecture.”

The slim and elegant spiral stair leading up from the entrance to the top level.

 The "lense" of the telescopic second level that has glazed walls and doors opening on to a balcony that forms the rim of the viewfinder.

The stream-lined kitchen with a far-reaching outlook across the tea plantations of Southern Japan.

The brilliant green tea bushes covering the Makinohara Plateau in the Shizuoka Prefecture in Japan.

The minimalist living and dining room divided by a sleek kitchen all in white.

The main bathroom with its deep Japanese tub, long basin with mirrored cupboards above and stony, concrete walls.

The house sits like a sculptural monument on a tiered stone wall above the modest local houses.

Slanted walls of raw concrete support the white-rendered, telescopic second level.

A courtyard of slim trees and gravel is created between the two concrete volumes of the ground floor that support the full-width of the top level above.

Scope lit up at twilight creating a welcoming courtyard entrance into the house.