Víctor Castillo has built, over the past three decades, one of the most solid careers in the art world. His talent as a painter has long captivated audiences beyond national borders, establishing a unique imaginary rooted in the colors of the southern Chilean sky, the influence of the Chilean cartoonist Coré, and the programming of Chilean children’s television during the 1970s and 1980s.
This pictorial field—subtly articulated as distinctly Chilean yet effective on a global scale—has been developed primarily through acrylic on canvas. However, particularly since his return to Chile, Castillo has successfully explored other visual art techniques: this was the case some time ago with his first charcoal works, exhibited at this gallery, and it is now the case with his first exhibition of oil paintings.
The transition to oil is not merely a change in technique: it is a profound transformation in the temporality of the work, since working with oil also implies a different material ethic. The slow-drying process forces the artist to coexist with uncertainty, to accept that a work is not completed when the artist decides it is, but only when the material allows it. There is, in this, a form of silent discipline: preparing the surfaces, measuring the oils, understanding the density of the pigments, waiting. Painting is thus constructed as an accumulation of glazes, transparencies, and opacities that require precision and patience, as well as a particular sensitivity for reading what emerges from the material itself.
In this transition, Víctor Castillo enters a mode of work in which painting responds to the slow, rhythmic breathing of the studio — even as he dances and laughs while painting.
In Sombras Tenebrosas [Dark Shadows], Castillo’s imaginary reappears as a recognizable scene: enigmatic figures set within crepuscular landscapes, where the atmosphere seems contaminated by a nuclear tension that never fully resolves.
This is not a direct quotation of popular iconography, but rather its slow deformation.
The palette, characteristic of his production, intensifies this effect: uncanny greens, incandescent oranges, and skies oscillating between dusk and conflagration construct a space where light does not so much illuminate as it warns. Thus, each scene appears organized under an internal logic where sweetness and violence coexist without hierarchy, as if painting once again functioned as an archive of what never fully becomes conscious: a visual memory that insists, returns, and, through repetition, gradually reveals the fissures of a collective imaginary shaped by the uncanny.
Art Theorist
