Jorge Castillo

JORGE CASTILLO CASALDERREY (Pontevedra, 1933).
"Kärnan (Helsingborg)", 2013.
Acrylic on canvas.
Attached certificate issued by the artist.
Work reproduced in; VV.AA., "Jorge Castillo in Sweden". Jorge Castillo Foundation, 2015, p.22.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Size: 130 x 89 cm.
This work is part of a series of 105 paintings made by Jorge Castillo during 2013. The series is inspired by the landscape of the small Swedish town of Helsingborg, where the artist was invited by the MDA Gallery, which held an exhibition on the painter at the end of 2012. This series is of great importance in the artist's career as it focuses all his attention on the landscape as a motif of creation, although it is true that he had previously portrayed the urban landscape of New York, the city that inspired much of his work, but never from a perspective where the natural invades the scene and becomes the sole protagonist. In the book Jorge Castillo in Sweden, it is described how the author "Castillo, with more than sixty years dedicated to art, seems to have decided to take the path of natural simplicity and we can see it in this use of only three or four colours to which he subjects his painting craft (Yola Quiros)". Castillo introduces us to the cold, to the stillness of an austere climate in a dreamlike way that is situated on the limits of reality.

Since he was a child, Jorge Castillo has been passionate about drawing, and at the age of ten he made his first copy of Rubens with coloured pencils. According to Castillo, Rubens' painting taught him to understand the cubism of Braque and Picasso. He has lived in Argentina, Spain, France, Italy, Germany and the United States, and has lived in Ibiza since 2008. He grew up in Buenos Aires, where he spent long hours at the port, as well as dedicating his time to painting and writing. Around this time he began to show his paintings, even exhibiting at the Salón de Mayo. He also published poems and short stories in magazines. However, at the age of twenty-two he decided to leave his city and go to Paris. However, for economic reasons he settled in Spain, specifically in Madrid, where he spent six years between 1957 and 1963, the first three of them living as a vagabond. However, his contact with Viola and Jorge Cela, who were impressed by his drawings, changed the course of his life. During these years he gradually turned to the technique of engraving, which from then on would be one of his main means of expression. He then began to emerge as an artist, to sell his first works and to establish some important contacts, protected by Luis González Robles, who in 1960 took him to the São Paulo Biennial. There his works surprised and won praise from critics, and during those years he also exhibited in Madrid and Barcelona, as well as in San Francisco, Lisbon, Pittsburgh and Tokyo. And it was in 1964, the year of his participation in the Venice Biennale, that the doors of Paris finally opened to him, thanks to the contract he signed with the art dealer André Schoeller. He settled in the French capital for almost four years, until 1967, and there he regularly visited the Louvre Museum and continued to hold increasingly successful exhibitions. In 1967 Castillo left Paris and moved to Geneva, as Schoeller had sold his contract to the Swiss Jan Krugier, then one of the most important gallery owners in Europe. However, he did not like the city, so he moved to Boissano in Italy. There he immersed himself in classical Italian art, especially that of the Trecento and Quattrocento, and in 1969 he was invited by the German government to work in Berlin, where he lived until 1975. In 1970 he exhibited at the Nationalgalerie in the German capital, the first major museum exhibition devoted to a specific period of his career, and subsequently in numerous Berlin galleries.