Esteban Castillo
Esteban Castillo
Painter. Son of artisans Rafael Castillo and Petra Vitorac. He studied at the School of Fine Arts Martín Tovar and Tovar de Barquisimeto (1955-1961), in a stage where he works still lifes, landscapes, and portraits. Between 1956 and 1964 he participated in the Julio T. Arze Hall and, in 1959, in the III Salón de Jóvenes Pintores (Caracas). Professor of the School of Fine Arts Martín Tovar y Tovar (1962-1964), in 1962 he received the first prize of the Julio T. Arze Hall with Figures. In 1964 he traveled to New York, where the impact of technification in American society led him to make the series of machines, which predominates spray paint with templates. One of these works, Machine XY-26, was awarded at the XII Salón D'Empaire in 1966. Between 1966 and 1967 he enriched his work with images of traffic signs, keys, arrows, and leaflets, as symbolic elements that describe industrial society, and begins to use gold and silver in his work. In 1967 he received a scholarship from the Inciba and traveled to Paris, where kinetic ideas and the geometric conception of forms were on the rise. They appear squares, circles, and triangles in their two-dimensional work, with an important presence of color. In 1969 he moved to London, where he studied the work of Mary Martin, what is perceived in the use of wood covered with cloth and industrial paint. From 1972, back in Paris, he works his programmed Constructions, where volume and black and white are present. In 1973 he spent some time in Venezuela, exhibited in Caracas and Barquisimeto and, the following year, settled in Paris, where he continues his Constructions, in which he will invest two more years, using a system based on simple geometric shapes, square modules that vary according to the movement of the spectator. From 1977 he works based on the Chinese tangram game; it adapts its geometric shapes and modifies them from one module to another, adding them or subtracting them. From this moment his work loses in volume and is oriented to the programmed fold. In 1979 and 1981 participates in the V and VI Kanawau International Exhibition in the city of Yokahaba (Japan). Starting in 1982, he left industrial painting aside to work with acrylic and returned to two-dimensionality. In 1986 he exhibits "A life with geometry". At the end of 1987, he returned to Venezuela and abandoned the influence of the tangram to locate himself in modules where the triangles gradually filled the spaces of the squares. From this moment the shape and color lead the viewer through a visual walk from the center to the edge of the canvas or vice versa. This will be the orientation of his work until 1993 when he leaves aside the rigidity that characterizes it and the circles appear and the color covers the entire surface; it joins squares and triangles through fine lines, giving more freedom and dynamism to the works. About his work comments Rodríguez Rodríguez: "the work of Esteban Castillo is of analytical refinement, translated into the distribution of geometric elements that are transformed and that are modified in their own essence and interiority and that transmit a massive, sometimes transparent, presence. sometimes with a dense reality, in which the work is not the subject or the object or the geometric form or color, but the whole, is itself "(1979). The GAN has in its collection serigraphs and engravings of this artist, dated between 1977 and 1990.