Jorge Castillo

Jorge Castillo was born in Pontevedra in 1933, and spent his early years in Buenos Aires. Considered by the critics to be one of the key exponents of contemporary Spanish art, Castillo currently lives in New York, and spends long periods of time in his house-studio of Ibiza. He has held exhibitions in major art centres, and his work also features in important collections in Europe and North America. Castillo is a difficult artist to classify, though he is without question one of the most poetically powerful contemporary artists alive. In addition to his accomplished mastery of drawing, the classical canon, the sense of line and light, and the transparency of objects, he has a singular ability to establish a magical relationship between objects and people, and creates a peculiar sensation of the lightness of space, which gives his work an exceptionally individual feel: everything seems to move between the reality present in the solemn texture of his brushstrokes and the meta-reality of the poetical concept. He creates sensitive, playful art in which the marvellous dialectic of chiaroscuro reveals the presence of the legacy of the finest traditions of Spanish painting. This can also be seen in the same existential questioning that fills the whole of his work with a highly personal, magical quality.