Printed Press Selection
|
|
ED Magazine, September 2019 Victor Castillo |
|
|
|
ROOSTER Magazine, March 2019 Your works tends to blend whimsy with dread, combining a lighthearted style with a darker theme. Would you say that you lean more toward pessimism or optimism in the real world? |
|
|
|
La Tercera Newspaper, December 13, 2018 Bright colors in scenes inspired by animation and street art are keys in the work of the painter who has been associated with the Lowbrow movement born in the 70s in California. [El artist local radical en EEUU exhibe por partido doble en Santiago sue icónicos niño de narices rojas. Colores llamativos en escenas que se inspiran en la animación y el arte callejero, esas son las claves del trabajo del pintor que a menudo ha sido asociado al movimiento Lowbrow, nacido en los 70 en California. ] |
|
|
|
étapes: design et culture visuelle, #212 Dessinateur compulsif, Victor Castillo développe très tôt des affinités avec le dessin. Il intègre différentes écoles d’art sans jamais y trouver satisfaction. Autodidacte, le peintre trouve son inspiration dans les oeuvres de David Lynch, Brian Eno, Paul McCarthy ou Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet, entre autres. Il se plaît à aveugler fillettes et garçonnets, tour à tour anarchistes, désoeuvrés, délirants, et les confronte aux vices humains. |
|
 |
hDL Magazine, #35 "The idea is that we are constantly being lied to in and by society. In my paintings it's also about clowns so it's a mix between lies and clowns. The sausage noses are a comic touch from Pinocchio, like the cherry on a cake." |
|
 |
CARNEMAG, Issue #20 What is behind your work? |
|
 |
JUXTAPOZ, March 2013 n146 What about your next show Under Heavy Measures? |
|
 |
Mono, Number 8 Many artists echo the pain denounced by Goya and reinterpret his engravings in their original sense, as deep wounds that remain open almost two centuries later. From the bittersweet illustrations of Chilean Victor Castillo to the British Chapman Brothers, they recognize the importance of Goya’s ability to capture the essence of modern warfare and strip it from the romance and chivalry that have been linked to it for so much time. |
|
 |
Georgie, Issue 9 Victor Castillo says he’s not a rebel, but you can be forgiven for thinking otherwise. His work is full of images mocking the traditional pillars of authority in society, whether churches, schools, or government. Patriotism, sports, the nuclear family, youth groups, mass entertainment and even Santa Claus are called into question in Castillo relentlessly dark, but morbidly funny view of the world. |
|
 |
HI-FRUCTOSE, Vol. 23 Interestingly there has been a subtle shift in Castillo’s work since we last spoke with him. His new paintings occasionally express a new sort of sentiment, in step with the global ramifications of events such as the uprisings in the Arabic world and the Occupy movements. His characters now occasionally are depicted doing something revolutionarily optimistic. |
|
 |
Chakota Mag, Vol. 23 “I am convinced that art can sensibilize and therefore improve our lives, but it can also be a bore reserved only for the academy.” |
|
 |
Public Art, #062 [Translation from Korean to come] |
|
 |
Bang Art, #8 “The exhibition Restless and Wild is about a vision of the world that is ‘innocent, wild, and cruel’, like children can be when they play. Like all of us can be. I feel more like I am a witness than speaking of personal things.” |
|
 |
The Colors of the Underground: Riding between Barcelona and Santiago, Chile, Victor Castillo has signed up to today more than three-hundred paintings in which cruelty and innocence are drawn with unusual mastery, irony, and a critical vision of the world in which we live. Up to today he has exhibited in cities such as Barcelona, Berlin, Los Angeles, and London. [Translated from Spanish] |
|
 |
MODART, No. 10 Mickey Mouse has a Meat Cleaver By Harlan Levy (Belgium) Victor Castillo doesn’t mess around. He shoots straight to the core, unrooting current and historic horrors of the species known as humanity. He rips issues up out of our collective suffering and expresses them with the chiaroscuro contrasts of an X-ray. Victor feels that there is a delicate line separating good and evil; his work suggests that he toes the line. |
|
 |
LOW Kunstmagazin, No. 5 “From 1991 on I went through different art schools. I left all of them, disappointed, until I ended up attending the worst one: The Catholic School of Arts. The incompatibility was so big, I was finally expelled. You can imagine what it feels like, to study arts in a place where you can’t talk about sex, religion or politics. It makes no sense at all.” |
|
 |
Copying Eden: Recent Art in Chile “Children are often cruel out of their own innocence” is the quote from Saint Augustine, which opens the catalog of Victor Castillo’s show Children OFF Revolution (Barcelona, 2005). This work combines a parody of the supposedly idyllic world of childhood with a criticism of the globalized industrial icons which are imposed on children’s imagination. It also contains the aesthetic of comics and cartoons in all their expressive power. [Translated from Spanish] |
|
 |
HI-FRUCTOSE, Vol. 8 |
|
 |
EL PÁIS Victor Castillo is a child of the Seventies, of comics, of Mazinger Z, of Pop as clandestine culture in a society marked by autarchy and the violence inherent to dictatorship. He grew up in a neighborhood that he remembers as ‘brave’. His work touches paintings and illustration, and it assumes without complexities classical references and that which have been called Pop Surrealism, most of all in its bloody and political aspects. Violence in primary colors. [Translated from Spanish, Nov. 2007] |
|
 |
Lamono, Núm. 31 Interview by Eva Villazala (Spain) “The biggest lie that they have sold to immobilize us is consumption and complacency. What is the use of art? In front of the world's real problems, art does not have utility. Maybe when it is affiliated with denunciation and provocation, like the messages we find in the documentary genre, it becomes relevant — that it can have a role educating social consciousness. [...] Behind my work is the constant predatory warning that man desires man, that ‘man eats man.’” [Translated from Spanish] |
|
 |
Salir, Salir, Número 79 A child’s world has the seeds of what is to come. ‘Violence in the media transforms children, the adults of the future,’ Victor Castillo affirms, ‘We reap what we sow.’ Frustration faced with the world, a certain impotence with regards to the conditions of society today are motivations behind his work. ‘For this reason I show a tragic-comic vision of reality.’ [Translated from Spanish] |
|
 |
Iguapop Gallery Bible The work of Victor Castillo is a piercing force; he reveals in his paintings post-apocolyptic landscapes drawn from the gut. Castillo uses his own language based on popular icons inherited from the world of comics, illustration and the cathode rays that flooded his childhood. After being unraveled, amputated, recomposed and recontextualized by the artist, Castillo’s characters become the narrative threads that spring from personal experiences but are elevated to universal facts. [Translated from Spanish] |
|
