Jacobo Castellano
13 Sep - 08 Nov 2012
JACOBO CASTELLANO
Dos de pino
13 September - 8 November 2012
The historiographic narratives of the Spanish art tradition have been built upon transmitters of creativity that have been repeated, or recovered, so often that they have even become identifying aspects. One of them is related to gravity, embellishment, violence or expressiveness (thematic, linguistic and material-related). Others are the grotesque and the bizarre, which were reproduced and re-categorized throughout the 20th century in the Buñuelesque and Berlanguian, and which are in many cases none other than social and anthropological visions.
Dos de pino, Jacobo Castellano's third exhibition in Fúcares' space in Madrid, demonstrates to what extent the Andalusian artist converges with those possible secular features, which he does not disown. The set of pieces he is showing now has not lost its characteristic poetic quality, its closeness, or its powerful materials, most of which are declassed and poor waste products. The harmonious violence of Postura illustrates this. The intimate and familiar sense in the pieces has not been lost either, as they are devoid of any neutral or aseptic bias, and instead explore experience and the inexorable passage of time. Like a sort of ruins, not only do many of the elements exhibit the heroic demeanor of what endures, but also the echo of what has been lived.
On this occasion, Jacobo Castellano does not focus on revisiting the house in which he lived in his childhood, one of the driving forces of his work, the realm of memory, quarry of experiences, site of materials for his assemblages and even the foremost setting in some of his previous exhibitions. An image such as Arqueología domestica would serve to illustrate his strategy -a poetics- of searching for himself, of exhumation of a past, of remembrance and vivification of recollections associated with that domestic family environment.
However, childhood has not disappeared from his universe. Some of the pieces, such as Pelele, allude to childishness, perhaps adding a grotesque view that converts it into a metaphor of us. In Malos tiempos a cardboard horse is violently split open, revealing that in one of its halves there is a figurative room in which a glass of milk predominates as a symbol of the artist's childhood. But Malos tiempos may work above all as a metaphor of childishness because the idea of destruction, of first gutting toys and later putting the pieces back together, as if in an assemblage, is related to a first creative impulse in children. In A Philosophy of Toys (1853) Baudelaire pointed out that a child destroys a toy in order to find its soul. That instinct runs through Castellano's veins. Not only does he seek and need the soul of the elements he recovers, but also the possible narratives or stories they contain.
Leaving the domestic environment has forged a Jacobo Castellano who reacts to the social situation, although -as could not be otherwise in him- by avoiding political and explicit references. Here, there is a powerful emergence of a branch of expressiveness, the grotesque -coupled with a value judgment- that dominates some characters and outlandish and comical situations, as is depicted in Ya son ganas, which may mirror reality.
In this sense, and unlike previous exhibitions, Castellano introduces the human figure, although formulated from the grotesque and through assemblage and collage. Bebedor 01, Bebedor 02, Pelele and even the kings in Dos de pino, still close to the homunculus and maybe to the ridiculous, represent the inclusion of anthropomorphism. Previously, the human element was denoted by the inclusion of objects that acted as synecdoches (some simple shoes informed us of the presence); something we still observe in Ya son ganas, where those shoes are skillfully employed to invite us to put ourselves in the place of someone who looks at a clown nose attached to a threatening hook.
Depending on the view of social reality, icons in his body of work, such as the approach to and rereading of the processional biers, may take on new meanings. Thus, in Paso, the terraced structure that holds the candles becomes a stand or perhaps a parliamentary podium, which is as far away from the ground as it is from reality. It would be elevated by the strength of Man who, hidden under the skirts, bears, like a penitence, the weight of what he carries.
In any case, above and beyond the interpretation of his pieces from the contingent and contextual standpoints, his images, artifacts and precarious symbolic machines must be assessed as poetics and powerful explorations of identity and the human condition -a self-portrait- through the materials and objects that we accumulate and discard and that produce in us emotional states, yearnings and fears (violence, punishment or incapacity).
Juan Francisco Rueda
Dos de pino
13 September - 8 November 2012
The historiographic narratives of the Spanish art tradition have been built upon transmitters of creativity that have been repeated, or recovered, so often that they have even become identifying aspects. One of them is related to gravity, embellishment, violence or expressiveness (thematic, linguistic and material-related). Others are the grotesque and the bizarre, which were reproduced and re-categorized throughout the 20th century in the Buñuelesque and Berlanguian, and which are in many cases none other than social and anthropological visions.
Dos de pino, Jacobo Castellano's third exhibition in Fúcares' space in Madrid, demonstrates to what extent the Andalusian artist converges with those possible secular features, which he does not disown. The set of pieces he is showing now has not lost its characteristic poetic quality, its closeness, or its powerful materials, most of which are declassed and poor waste products. The harmonious violence of Postura illustrates this. The intimate and familiar sense in the pieces has not been lost either, as they are devoid of any neutral or aseptic bias, and instead explore experience and the inexorable passage of time. Like a sort of ruins, not only do many of the elements exhibit the heroic demeanor of what endures, but also the echo of what has been lived.
On this occasion, Jacobo Castellano does not focus on revisiting the house in which he lived in his childhood, one of the driving forces of his work, the realm of memory, quarry of experiences, site of materials for his assemblages and even the foremost setting in some of his previous exhibitions. An image such as Arqueología domestica would serve to illustrate his strategy -a poetics- of searching for himself, of exhumation of a past, of remembrance and vivification of recollections associated with that domestic family environment.
However, childhood has not disappeared from his universe. Some of the pieces, such as Pelele, allude to childishness, perhaps adding a grotesque view that converts it into a metaphor of us. In Malos tiempos a cardboard horse is violently split open, revealing that in one of its halves there is a figurative room in which a glass of milk predominates as a symbol of the artist's childhood. But Malos tiempos may work above all as a metaphor of childishness because the idea of destruction, of first gutting toys and later putting the pieces back together, as if in an assemblage, is related to a first creative impulse in children. In A Philosophy of Toys (1853) Baudelaire pointed out that a child destroys a toy in order to find its soul. That instinct runs through Castellano's veins. Not only does he seek and need the soul of the elements he recovers, but also the possible narratives or stories they contain.
Leaving the domestic environment has forged a Jacobo Castellano who reacts to the social situation, although -as could not be otherwise in him- by avoiding political and explicit references. Here, there is a powerful emergence of a branch of expressiveness, the grotesque -coupled with a value judgment- that dominates some characters and outlandish and comical situations, as is depicted in Ya son ganas, which may mirror reality.
In this sense, and unlike previous exhibitions, Castellano introduces the human figure, although formulated from the grotesque and through assemblage and collage. Bebedor 01, Bebedor 02, Pelele and even the kings in Dos de pino, still close to the homunculus and maybe to the ridiculous, represent the inclusion of anthropomorphism. Previously, the human element was denoted by the inclusion of objects that acted as synecdoches (some simple shoes informed us of the presence); something we still observe in Ya son ganas, where those shoes are skillfully employed to invite us to put ourselves in the place of someone who looks at a clown nose attached to a threatening hook.
Depending on the view of social reality, icons in his body of work, such as the approach to and rereading of the processional biers, may take on new meanings. Thus, in Paso, the terraced structure that holds the candles becomes a stand or perhaps a parliamentary podium, which is as far away from the ground as it is from reality. It would be elevated by the strength of Man who, hidden under the skirts, bears, like a penitence, the weight of what he carries.
In any case, above and beyond the interpretation of his pieces from the contingent and contextual standpoints, his images, artifacts and precarious symbolic machines must be assessed as poetics and powerful explorations of identity and the human condition -a self-portrait- through the materials and objects that we accumulate and discard and that produce in us emotional states, yearnings and fears (violence, punishment or incapacity).
Juan Francisco Rueda