Madrid,
It has been a long time, almost three decades, since Jacobo Castellano finished his studies in Fine Arts at the University of Granada and began to work by recovering waste and scraps, and later using abandoned architectural objects and remains, sometimes preserved by the skin of his teeth after being integrated into more or less precarious amalgams. With them he created pieces based on accumulation, but aesthetically refined, which gave these fragments a new context, even new roots, and already then he began to pay attention to wood, as a material of obvious natural origin, but also linking it to his own body, granting it his traces.
This artist from Jaén continues along this path, and his recent work can be seen until next January at the Sala Alcalá 31 in the Community of Madrid, in the exhibition “El espacio entre los dedos”, curated by Tania Pardo; it is once again made up of portions of the tangible that, at times, suggest what is not: memory, linked to personal and family experiences and also to the body itself. Five years ago, Castellano presented the project “riflepistolacañon” at the CAAC in Seville and at Artium Museoa in Vitoria, which opened with a drawing of some innocent weapons made by a child who left it lying on the street and which then took us back to a childhood inhabited by incomplete and not always pleasant images, the touchstone of some of the artist’s sculptural or installation works, in a more or less explicit or veiled way.
The forms of the exhibition and the ones we can now see in Madrid have changed to a certain extent, but not Castellano’s in-depth analysis of time and his personal and, at times, collective memory: his past and latest works reveal his childhood allergy to lactose and the rites of Holy Week in Andalusia, as well as Goyaesque references, in disjointed puppets that fall into the void almost like the condemned in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, their limbs transformed into lines that mark tensions; now the germ of many of his compositions are, likewise, visits to the Prado, not at all canonical, with the curator, but also, as we will see, architectures that are close to him or wood that he acquires from cabinetmakers he knows well.
Castellano, in short, is not limited to the investigation of the external as a method in his artistic practices, choosing to open the doors to the (feasible) examination of personal experience and memory when generating iconographies that will always be individual, perhaps as different as one olive trunk is from another. His most common technique is sculpture – although he has also worked, as we will see in Alcalá 31, in the fields of painting, drawing and photography – because it is this wood that allows him to obtain very different, and personal, expressive fruits from his direct carving: more or less rudimentary finishes, soft or forceful, the trace of his inverted nails.
Although the importance of the spaces he inhabits continues to be evident in his creations (in previous projects he evoked the summer house of his childhood, the cinema that his grandfather ran and objects present in those places that he approached as containers of memory, and the current exhibition in Madrid will be accessed through the recreation of the doors of the Casa de las Flores in Secundino Zuazo, where Castellano lives), it is true that his production has gained layers of reading thanks to elements that we can relate to his experiences, and to a nature that he has not stopped nourishing himself from, but also to Spanish Baroque painting: milk – which is also linked to his aforementioned allergy to lactose -, oil – which is culture and land in Jaén, where Castellano was born, and which also gradually modifies wood -, metals, waxes or dust.
Pardo hopes that, after contemplating these pieces, the public will want to come and visit the Prado to see the presence of these elements in quite a few compositions, not just still lifes: Castellano’s creations gathered here, mainly sculptural and pictorial, arose from the study of details, a priori secondary, of certain works in the gallery, such as the movements of Hercules’ body in the series that Zurbarán dedicated to his works, the sober settings of his paintings, the structures in which Sánchez Cotán arranged the food in his still lifes, or certain compositional methods (The puppet) and ways of dealing with tragedy (The dog) by Goya. Not only has this museum recently provided the source of inspiration for Castellano, whose vases and jars have a long tradition there, but also the structure of the altarpiece of San Benito el Real, which is kept in the National Museum of Sculpture in Valladolid, or the Castilian landscapes, with earthy and austere tones, of Godofredo Ortega Muñoz (whose exhibition at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum is currently bringing him face to face with Eduardo Chillida).
The title of this exhibition, “The Space Between the Fingers,” refers to the children’s game of hiding the thumbs and anticipates the ideas present in the exhibition in two ways: we will find traces in his wooden pieces that refer to that position of the hands and, above all, continuous claims to play, even to magic: the public will have to slowly contemplate each of the works to find staples that evoke wounds or gold leaf in beautiful conjunction with thick linen fabrics, similar to burlap, like constellations on a humble sky related to the gilding of Berruguete or Murillo. It should be noted that the surface of these creations, executed with oil bars, will not dry completely, so that their current appearance will progressively accumulate layers of dust. The artist constantly resorts to the assembly of materials, especially fragile and worn ones, which carry a history; Likewise, the presence of the trace of his fingers, sometimes of his nose or his shoes, does not cease to imply a particular notion of self-portrait through absence.
There is nothing materially artificial in the works of Jacobo Castellano, although this is not just by choice: while studying painting in Granada he suffered from chemical poisoning which made him turn to sculpture and the use of non-toxic and odorless components. Since he came to three-dimensionality from that other discipline, at the centre of this montage we will find three canvases in a scenographic arrangement; they do not contain any motif, only pigment on linen, which gave so much play to Manolo Millares, José Guerrero or Antonio Saura.
“Jacobo Castellano. The space between the fingers”
ALCALA ROOM 31
c/ Alcalá, 31
Madrid
From September 12, 2024 to January 12, 2025
