Artist: José Castiella

gallery rosenfeld presents the Spanish artist Jose Castiella’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. On this occasion, the artist finds himself focusing on what he terms, ‘the spiritual realm’. As he himself explains, ‘in the past few years, I’ve had experiences that make me believe in the reality of the spiritual beyond any need for faith’.

‘The isometric spaces and symbolic colour choices ‘which Castiella creates ‘evoke a world that exists beyond ordinary perception, a dimension where the true nature of souls, hidden from our physical eyes, is revealed through plastic expression.’ It’s fascinating to draw a comparison with the works of the Dutch printmaker Maurits Escher. Whereas Escher’s steps are concerned with mathematics and a formal perfection, Castiella’s works begin with that same perfection which is then torpedoed by the emergence of the artist’s army of fantastical figures who emerge from all areas of the seemingly perfectly constructed world giving the breath of life to this previously sterile world.

The artist thus becomes a kind of demiurge revealing to us a secret but very real world which had previously been hidden to our human eyes. It is the ‘miracle’ of painting which reveals this previously hidden universe to us. The characters which populate these paintings are, for Castiella, spiritual beings rather than material ones; their ugliness and deformity relating to the view propounded by some mystics of how souls may appear deformed by sin in the spiritual realm. Elaborating on this is the idea, dear to the artist, that someone beautiful in appearance might be terrible in the spiritual realm, whilst ’a homeless person, perceived as flawed by society, might have a sacred purity.’

The large painting in the exhibition is more related to Dante’s ‘Purgatory’ in its depiction of the different stages in the purification of the soul. The structure Castiella now conjures up is an impossible one, the steps representing different planes of reality.

There is a strong element of Kafka’s ‘The Castle’ in these paintings where a seemingly hermetically closed world is portrayed. A foreboding labyrinthian space. However, against this apparent formal perfection, the artist’s plethora of characters are brimming with life as they move in and out and around the structure. These paintings manage to convey Castiella’s highly ambitious objective due to his extraordinary ability with paint, line, shadow and volume which enables him to create his very unique world with total conviction. His characters are created spontaneously by pouring paint on the canvas before skilfully manoeuvring it to give birth to these strange forms of life. On the one hand his paintings display an absolute control whilst on the other exerting a wild freedom.