Opening 15 january at isabel croxatto galería, Santiago
And I saw a cross that severed my head
And I saw a sword that blessed me before my death.
A dream and a nightmare came to life in Víctor Castillo’s mind, giving birth to the visual production you now have before your eyes: a kind of artwork that, for the first time, distances us from the vibrant pigments of artificial colors he once accustomed us to, leading us without mercy into the most radical chiaroscuro.
The dream that gave rise to this new materiality was one in which the artist envisioned himself walking through the streets of his hometown, carrying a roll of papers as if they were scraps from his studio. Along the way, he encounters a group of students who ask him what he is throwing away. Together, they begin to unroll the papers, revealing charcoal drawings. At that moment, Víctor says, "Wow, why am I discarding this?” This powerful, dreamlike image propelled him to explore the use of charcoal on paper.
Many things change when he abandons the brush, the canvas, and the colors to take a piece of charcoal in his hand and draw directly on paper. Víctor discovers he must work from outside, beginning with shadows and bringing in the light last. As the technique evolves, it reaches far beyond what he initially envisioned in his dream—that personal dream.
However, the nightmare that haunts him is collective.
We live in a world overwhelmed by unprecedented visual violence. Within this context, these works were conceived as a response to the emotional impact caused by the images and information surrounding us. In times when narratives of war saturate our consciousness, the media threatens us with forgetfulness, and history has yet to be written by the vanquished, so art stripped of its vibrant colors becomes imperative. It establishes an imaginary record of our psychic impressions: an archive of the collective subconscious to which future generations may turn.
This is why the title of this text, drawn from a poem by the Mapuche poet Leonel Lienlaf, is so significant. For the original inhabitants of a land preserve in their words and images the memory not only of massacres and colonial invasions but, above all, the certainty of a perpetual, collective rebirth.
Natalia Arcos Salvo
Art Theorist
