Victor Castillo's Sweeter Than Roses
By Dian Hanson, TASCHEN Sexy Book Editor
When artists overpaint photographs they generally deface their canvas in something akin to graffiti. Though the paint may be skillfully applied it still blurs and obscures, canceling instead of enhancing the original.
This is not the case with Victor Castillo's Sweeter Than Roses. Rather than cancel, Castillo's brush bonds in a symbiotic and loving relationship with photos originally created for American men's magazines between 1960 and '69. He explains that he encountered such magazines as a child, hidden by his older brother at home, and in almecenes de barrio and mechanic's bays: the gendered spaces where men gathered without women. Current brain studies confirm that viewing sexually charged photos triggers the release of dopamine, which fixes pleasure to memory, and oxytocin, the human bonding hormone. When Castillo reencountered the black and white women of his youth synapses fired, receptors received, and he felt a deep, immediate, sensual connection, coupled with a child's yearning to somehow touch these magical avatars of first love.
His touch takes the form of intricate tattoos, rendered in ink and acrylic, perfectly embracing the curves of each fantasy mistress. Wrapping them in his signature creations - menacing iterations of classic children's illustration - is both a gift of affectionate memory, and an act of impetuous possession, making them his own, while suggesting they chose his tattoos from reciprocal admiration.
Castillo describes the series as an act of love and will explore the feeling further by painting on living models in collaboration with a photographer.
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Model: Virginia Rogers
Photographer: Ron Vogel
Year: 1963
Virginia Rogers was one of the most famous adult film actresses of her time. Her versatility led her to have an eclectic career, performing in roles as a dancer, stripper and other classic archetypes of adult films.
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Model: Alison Sandborne
Photographer: Unknown
Year: 1960
The current circumstances led me to work in a more intimate and introspective way, locked up in my home and studio, with more time than usual. In that calm and intimacy, I found the perfect place to experiment with these found images I had been collecting for years. - Víctor Castillo
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Model: Karen Mourning
Photographer: Ron Vogel
Year: 1968
Ron Vogel was one of the most renowned erotic photographers in the scene. Born in San Francisco, California, in 1931, he dedicated his career to shoot pin-up models, creating a large production. Models such as Karen Mourning, Jean Bradley, Diane Lawrence and Judy McCutcheon posed for his lens. Vogel’s images presented domestic scenes, including living rooms, kitchens and backyards, linking the erotic fantasy with the everyday life.
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Model: Shawn Devereaux
Photographer: Unknown
Year: 1960
Shawn ‘Baby Doll’ Devereaux was a relevant erotic film actress with a brief but stellar career in the early 1970s, performing in motion pictures such as The Seven Minutes, How To Succeed With Sex, and Fandango.
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Model: Sue Layton
Photographer: Ron Vogel
Year: 1967
In addition to his own production, Ron Vogel also collaborated with the legendary Goodtime Weekly Calendar 1963, which presented pin-up or nude models for each week of the year, as well as providing cartoons and images for fiction publications by Good Time Publishing and Whitestone Publications.
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Model: Dimpy
Photographer: Fred Enke
Year: 1969
Fred Enke shot models like Dimpy and many other pin-ups or ‘cheesecake’ girls (slang for scantily-clad or nude beautiful women), working with domestic settings similar to those of his contemporaries. However, his compositions stood out for featuring more than one model, creating some of the most erotic images of the 1960s, in the midst of the Sexual Revolution.
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Model: Virginia Rogers
Photographer: Ron Vogel
Year: 1963
Virginia Rogers starred in the 1961 film Kipling’s Women, one of the first ‘nudies’ to gain wide-spread distribution in the United States. The picture was loosely based in Nobel Prize laureate Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Ladies, and was advertised stating the women wore ‘only the wind.’
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Model: Brigitte Cannes
Photographer: Unknown
Year: 1960
For years, I have had a folder with a large digital archive where I have kept sketches of unexecuted paintings, drawings that I have never finished; previously discarded designs that I keep at hand and that have not come to light before, and to which I have resorted today to intervene in these images. - Víctor Castillo
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Model: Sheila West
Photographer: Fred Enke
Year: 1969
Sheila West developed her career mainly as a nude model and adult film actress in the late 1960s and 1970s. Later, she appeared on single episodes of the mainstream British TV series Secret Army in 1979, and Blake’s 7 and The Gentle Touch in 1980.
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Model: Dimpy
Photographer: Fred Enke
Year: 1969
Fred Enke worked for the prestigious British softcore porn magazine Men Only, established in 1935 by C. Arthur Pearson in a pocket-size edition, including a diversity of content aimed to a male audience. To keep its position in the market, it shifted its content into pin-up models. In 1971, the renowned nightclub owner Paul Raymond relaunched Men Only, positioning the magazine amongst the top shelf porn publications, competing with Playboy and Penthouse, and including interviews and articles.
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Model: Alice Friedland
Photographer: Fred Enke
Year: 1969
Alice Friedland was an actress who performed in a diversity of films during the 1970s, including sexy comedies, dramas and erotic thrillers, such as The Great Texas Dynamite Chase, The Capitol Hill Girls, and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. The latter was directed by John Cassavetes, one of the most prominent indie directors in the 1970s and 1980s.
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These images once were erotic or pornographic to me, nowadays I see them almost in a sculptural way. They remind me of that fascination for the indulgence of the first desire for another body, the female body. These images connect me with my childhood, with places like the grocery store or the mechanic's shop in my neighborhood in Santiago, with posters of naked women, and a whole era of innocence and erotic awakening from the perspective of a child or teenager.
Víctor Castillo
Los Angeles, CA
March 2021
