Revisiting Somewhere Over the Rainbow and the first episode of HelMel’s artist docu-series, presented by Val Kilmer and HelMel Studios in Los Angeles in 2021.
As we move toward La Jaula Invisible, Víctor Castillo’s first retrospective at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Isabel Croxatto Galería revisits some of the exhibitions, encounters and collaborations that have marked more than two decades of the Chilean artist’s international trajectory.
In 2021, Castillo presented Somewhere Over the Rainbow at HelMel Studios & Gallery in Los Angeles, in collaboration with Val Kilmer, HelMel Studios and Isabel Croxatto Galería. Conceived as a personal tribute to cinema—one of the artist’s most enduring sources of inspiration—the exhibition turned toward Hollywood and the visual culture that shaped Castillo’s imagination from an early age.
Familiar images and references to classic cinema were transformed through Castillo’s unmistakable visual language, in which the apparent innocence of cartoons and childhood fantasy coexists with darker narratives of desire, violence, power, and disillusionment.
Writing on the occasion of the exhibition, critic Sharon Mizota observed how Castillo works from a visual vocabulary already deeply embedded in our collective imagination. Rather than rejecting the language of mass media and popular culture, he appropriates it and turns it against itself, constructing alternative narratives that expose what lies beneath the promises and fantasies of the images we consume.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow also became the setting for the first episode of HelMel’s artist docu-series. Filmed in Los Angeles, the short documentary—executive-produced by Val Kilmer and Tom Stratton, directed and edited by Jeremy Cross, and creatively directed and written by Tom Stratton—offers an intimate encounter with Castillo, his practice, and the visual universe surrounding the exhibition.
Reflecting on Castillo’s paintings, Val Kilmer wrote:
“Victor executes brilliant color and light, compounded with seemingly sweet but often twisted themes. These tenets set the mood in his paintings. Whether you like them or not, you just can’t stop looking at them. They move you.” — Val Kilmer
Five years later, revisiting this film offers a window onto a particular moment in Castillo’s international trajectory, while revealing concerns that continue to resonate throughout his work: the power of images, the construction of desire and the uneasy territory where childhood memory, seduction and violence converge.
This November, that trajectory returns to Santiago with La Jaula Invisible, Víctor Castillo’s first retrospective at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Chile, bringing together more than two decades of a practice developed between Chile and the international art scene.
