Victor Castillo Biography

Following studies at the University of Art and Social Sciences (ARCIS) and the Catholic University of Chile, Victor joined the independent experimental art collective Caja Negra in Santiago, creating multimedia installations. In 2004 Victor moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he dedicated himself to painting and established his style with references to comics, graffiti, and old master paintings, particularly Goya's Black Paintings after seeing them at the Prado Museum.

Victor's Explicit Lyrics exhibition with Iguapop Gallery in 2007 was a critical success with the national newspaper El País publishing a full-page article about his tragicomic vision titled The Triumph of Pop Surrealism. Victor's first solo exhibition in the United States When the Heavens Open was with Roq La Rue in Seattle, followed by Gameland with Merry Karnowsky Gallery, and in 2010 Victor moved to Los Angeles, California, where he lives and works. Victor was featured in the traveling museum exhibition Turn the Page: The First Ten Years of High Fructose (USA, 2016–17), and in the__Les Enfantes Terribles exhibition during the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art (France, 2011). Victor's work has been presented by Isabel Croxatto at international art fairs Ch.ACO Santiago, Istanbul Contemporary, Art Central Hong Kong, and ZONA MACO Mexico City, among many other galleries and fairs worldwide. Victor has created murals for the National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA) and Centro Gabriela Mistral (GAM) in Santiago, Chile; the Museum of Modern Art in Chiloe; the Center for Contemporary Culture Barcelona (CCCB), Spain; and the Fabbrica di Vapore Che exhibition in Milan, Italy.

Hollywood Dreams, a 6-minute short film by Loica and Barefoot Productions about Victor's work, won the Gold Remi Award at the 52nd Annual WorldFest-Houston in 2018.

Victor Castillo is represented by Gin Huang Gallery in Asia.

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Playful yet dark, Victor's work lures you into a cartoon world where leering wolves cavort with perverse, Pinocchio-like children in works that echo the multiplane camera effects utilized by Disney's Nine Old Men—the legendary fantasy factory's core animators. Victor conjures compelling tableaux that are as chimerical as they are apocalyptic, chaotic, lonely, and isolating.

The artist has found a way of harnessing the tropes, style and imagery of pop culture, infusing commonplace concepts with creepy subtext. Here is horror and humor. For children, fairy tales are cautionary tales—finger-wagging rehearsals for grown up life, quite grim (Brothers Grimm reference intended here), despite their candy coating. In these stories, Dickensian urchins are often orphaned or ostracized and left to fend for themselves. Victor amplifies this notion, twisting it a few more notches by taking the child's avatar, the cartoon character, and inserting it into truly ominous contexts while simultaneously teasing the eye with distorted scales. The seduction of accessibility and familiarity is both entertaining and unnerving; an adult perspective of a kid's vision, a tense conversation between the sweet and the sinister.

Victor's vision of America, specifically the myth of Hollywood, is central to his latest paintings, layering in film and pop culture references that pull between the quick read and the deliberately ambiguous. It's up to the viewer to invent the backstory implied. The implications are rewarding, obsessive and critical. Like searching for Easter eggs in hell. His practice is organic, his surreal scenarios and characters plucked from the ether of animation and psychedelic illustration (Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman come to mind). He renders his multifaceted, complex images with a trained hand. And apart from his accomplished and obvious technical skills, his compositions are beautifully modeled, and lit with a painter's eye. It's exciting to discover art that stays with you long after seeing it. Victor's work is haunting in all the right ways.

—Val Kilmer

Setting the Stage

Victor's work provides a kind of release, a candy colored fantasy world where satire, critique, and reckless abandon take shape in a completely satisfying and fully narrated form. Victor is the ultimate theater director, setting the stage, lighting, and characters in costume to an exacting degree while overseeing every minute detail down to the scoring of music for each scene in his mind's eye. The rest is up to us. We have the pleasure of enjoying what unfolds: the drama, darkness, seduction, mystery, longing, and laughter. There are scenes, rendered through paint and canvas that you may have to look away from, and others that leave you dancing in your seat. There is never a dull thought or moment.

Victor's ultimate mastery is that he meets us where we are at, without judgment or malice. His paintings are intentionally layered to allow us to experience them from the vantage point we wish—reflecting on humanity's worst impulses: greed, suppression, fear of other, and brutality—or at our best: seeing beauty, hope, humor and our enduring capacity to love unconditionally. Often it's a combination of both. And it's always our choice. It's always our mirror.

— Merry Karnowsky

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_Ashes, Ashes, _****We All Fall Down ...

Victor Castillo is truly an artist of our age. Much like other artists working in socio-politically fraught times, Castillo's subject matter can be a little hard to manage. His messages are harsh and uncomfortable truths, rendered in theatrically dark backgrounds, sickly whites, and lurid clown colors. Each one stars grotesquely smiling and vacant-eyed Pinocchio-type characters. These features denote brutality, dishonesty, and willful ignorance, and his villains are always in the midst of some terrible act, gleefully lying to everyone about what they are doing and how they are getting away with it. Despite that, each painting is rapturously beautiful in execution and wrapped up in a bubbly cartoonism designed to tug ironically on nostalgic tendencies.

There's a quote I heard once that seems to fit many viewers thoughts on Castillo's work: "I am seduced by my repulsion". It's hard to look at, for what it says about us as humans, but it entices our eye nonetheless. And that's good, because Castillo's work is an important statement on our current world, commenting on the destructive nature of colonialism, cronyism, capitalism, racism, and the overarching greed for more at the cost of all. He is deftly able to capture the viewers' attention and transmit a message in seconds, crucial in this time of tiny attention spans, with the mindless churn of vapid vanities and media manipulations designed to distract us at every turn.

Castillo's work resonates with Pop Surrealism, an art movement that, in the early 2000s, was starting to cause a global stir for its insouciant approach to the high art world. It maintains a steadfast devotion to technical excellence and provocative subject matter, with a heavy, unapologetic nod to kitsch culture. Castillo's work was quickly embraced by the juggernaut of this movement because of its intelligent horror-pop sensibilities. His imagery turned beloved children's iconography on its ear and slashed at the soft, bloated underbelly so that unpleasant truths about the world could tumble out.

Most artists in the Pop Surrealism movement focused more on the inner world of the psyche, full of strange but generally beautiful symbolism and magical realism. Outside influences tended to be that of the natural world, and mankind's impact upon it, sad warnings of climatic and environmental changes.Castillo's work took the socio-political world head-on, savagely depicting the tribulations of a capitalist, hyper-consumerist society.Castillo's work goes far past the sly wink, going full bore for the jugular. For all its crazy cartoonery and black humor, it's really not funny at all; rather, it is sobering and reflective, even if you get a sense of a strange joyful catharsis when you see some rotten character get a comeuppance in one of the paintings.

— Kirsten Anderson