Post Imaginem: Different Light, Different Reflections
In Post Imaginem, Paloma Castillo's new solo exhibition presented by Isabel Croxatto Galería in its main gallery, the notions of memory, reminiscence and reference are proposed as conceptual activation cores of inspiration, as well as dynamic principles in the construction of intensely mixed imaginaries. In her new collection of embroideries, the intense and caustic approach developed since Ex Post (2020) – her first solo exhibition at the gallery – is presented enriched both in its technical exploration and argumentative articulation. Each stitch, each area of colour, reveals a utopian space inhabited by hybridised imaginaries and temporalities that, although hard to locate in the course of individual commonplaces, nevertheless function as evocative axes of some past experience or personal certainty presented in its aesthetic manifestation as luminous and sublime.
The link with art history, the natural inclination to focus on those bright flashes of popular culture, and social contingency as the core generator of renewed collective perspectives are some of the characteristics of Paloma Castillo's work. Post Imaginem is a powerful series of embroideries composed, on the one hand, of elements taken from paradigmatic works of European art (Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Paul Rubens) and, on the other, from a gallery of portraits of artists (Joan Miró, Rebeca Matte). While configuring her work, the artist stealthily modulates a body of work that questions us through a heterogeneous physiognomy, coherent with approaches as diverse as the romantic, the grotesque, the absurd and the ghostly.
Paloma Castillo's work involves a constant search for past forms and temporalities that evoke aesthetic and ideological utopias that have left their mark on our culture. As a collector of obscure images and mysterious artefacts, the artist visits, agitates and is fascinated by the details that underlie both the interior of a work of art and the mundane. Imperceptible details and symbols, condensed in saturated tonalities, reveal transversal narratives reappropriated in Post Imaginem to materialise an imaginary whose constant feature is precisely its possibility of stylistic and narrative redefinition. In many ways, the work gives rise to a bizarre technicolour crossover in which the moralising message of a Bosch can skilfully coexist with the deliciously shameless carnality of a Rubens.
In La Visión (Vision, 2023), the original allegory of Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510) is transformed into a contemporary lighting scene in which the original figures – the monkey sitting on the back of an elephant by a stream – become a white rabbit (with a man's foot around its neck for good luck), expanding its supernatural vision, standing on a pig. Crossed by flying steam irons, the piece engages in a dialogue with the current codes of impact and speed of visual reading that the electronic image demands of us, without losing its nod to the supernatural and the sublime. In the age of the immaterial, the boundaries and hierarchies between low and high culture are diluted in the urgency of the new, so the juxtaposition of forms as a visual strategy becomes a necessary practice to dynamise the austerity of existence.
Two embroideries take up references from The Haywain Triptych (c. 1516). In Serpiente (Serpent, 2023), the bucolic temptation and timeless atmosphere of the original piece return through a momentary referential space, materialised in a lamp post embraced by a transient creature, half Eve, half serpent, which unfolds naturally towards us, stripped of its amoral function. La Caída (The Fall, 2023), on the other hand, is inspired by the apocalyptic sky painted in the same work, in which Bosch depicts the manifestation of God's power, represented by the fall of the rebellious angels, who take the form of toads and insects as they fall to earth. In the artist's version, the fallen angels do not change form but assume a non-identity that seems to allow them to fall to earth in a germinating form.
Una Gracia (A Grace, 2023) - based on the paradigmatic painting of the Three Graces (1636-1639) by Rubens - is presented as Heaven and Earth constellated in a single piece. The main figure unfolds before us as the inhabitant of a transmigratory space, where the pink flamingo appears as the physiognomy of a new corporeality, with a Mickey Mouse purse and the rictus of a character taken directly from a scene by the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar.
The portrait in the Post Imaginem space is presented as an opportunity for self-knowledge. In contemplating the improbable features created by the embroidered patterns of dozens of coloured threads that form the figure, the world as we know it dissolves to become a spiritual mirror of ourselves. Retrato de un Autorretrato(Portrait of a Self-Portrait, 2023) reflects a desire to be read as energy and multiplicity. Painted by Miró during a primary phase of Surrealism, the original work, in its proto-Cubist treatment of the image, hints at a transient period in the representation of the figure in modern art. One could feel that the same transience present in the original work traces the path that allows Castillo to render her own version, which captures the emotional energy emanating from the painter.
In contrast, Chilean sculptor Rebeca Matte is captured in It's My Rock! (2024) through the freshness of the present. The context of her work, surprisingly renewed after being symbolically covered with an acrylic rock as part of a local art action, leads us to reflect on the subjectivity of frameworks and the intangibility of history. In front of an ochre background crossed by a horizon, the figure, dressed in blue, displays a delicate and enigmatic pendant. A closer look reveals that it is the same meteorite that replaced her sculpture in real life. The figures created by Paloma dominate a scenario without stable referential coordinates: it could well be a contemporary figure wearing the souvenir of a whimsical act masquerading as contemporary art.
Within the orthodoxies of artistic creation, the copy, as an aesthetic and thematic resource, is condemned to a secondary and antagonistic territoriality, because it not only emphasises the obviousness of the model but also threatens to reveal the secret of the sublime. Post Imaginem presents us with an ephemeral mental register that could change its structural principles at any moment. The work is proposed as a repository of chromatic impressions, untamed fantasies or improbable figures, the product of a journey, a visit or perhaps an experience recorded many years ago. History is meant to be a springboard to the inevitable trivialisation implied in the hierarchisation of the Western image, but Paloma Castillo frees us from the curse of triviality and the commonplace in art.
Leonardo Casas, artist and academic.
April 2024.
