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PALOMA CASTELLO
REPRESENTED ARTIST
Paloma Castello born 1988 Bogotá, Colombia.
I use my work to bring life or a different narrative to an object’s past. I’m interested in playing with memory and relating it to the present, creating an atmosphere between reality and fiction. My family and social background have a powerful influence on my work. I grew up surrounded by objects and anecdotes inherited from my ancestors that inspire endless surreal stories. My work emerges from these experiences; they are evidence of my “auto-fiction”.
"Paloma Castello presents to us a nostalgia-filled body of work. The collection represents the soul of her proposal: inherited objects discovered or found that have become the tip of the iceberg of her past. These are elements she collects, recollects, and then classifies following a method that frames her anachronic attitude that proves as evidence of the youth of her art.
She also demonstrates that the experimentations on herself are common in an artist who’s just beginning her career. Without a doubt, this resource, valid and true becomes the road that determines the experimental character of the author.
ARTWORKS
Neon Classics Series
In her work she likes to bring life to objects or icons from the past, intervening in them a bit, using her own ideals and dreams. NEÓN-Classics is a series of serigraphs of Greco-Roman characters printed on wood, with added neon lights. The artist was inspired by the neoclassical period, which highlights beauty with very simple elements containing few lines, and She selected Greek gods such as Poseidon, Venus, Apollo, and Aphrodite as her characters. These mythological characters play an essential role in both art history and our beliefs and emotions, as they represent our deepest human experiences. The figures in this work are accompanied by either words or objects in neon lights, which to her represent the relationship between darkness and light. Although they are lights, in our collective imagination we associate them with nocturnal scenes and they therefore endow these pieces with surreal and romantic interpretive elements. The words She has selected seek to evoke sets of emotions, moods, or internal humors that make it possible to appreciate the work, which in turn creates a more intimate bond with the characters in it.
Gynaeceum Series
Two of the recurring themes in Paloma Castello's work converge again in Gineceo (Gynaeceum): an exquisite femininity and her fascination with the ancient world. However, far from the exoticism of her previous forays, on this occasion the encounter takes place in the domestic and everyday. Hence, surely, her ceramic experimentation: nine central pieces dedicated to a peculiar group of divine women.
Exotic Delirium Series
Castello's “Exotic Delirium” series pays tribute to the constant hybridization and miscegenation, to the richness that springs from the intersection of different universes, to the possibility of cohabitation and the need for adaptation, and to the landscape as a historical and a dynamic composition where dreams, reality, and fiction are interwoven.
The Dis-enchanted Series
The artist has always liked divas and femmes-fatales. My grandmothers spoke often of these actresses and admired them openly as if they were real. They created a collective imagination, which inspired the wonderful illusion that the universe they inhabited was real. The problem was, that they never told me the truth about them and I always had a distorted 61 image of these divas. I was forever duped.
The Castelloland Series
Castelloland works with objects whose uniqueness proves to be fundamental to the piece’s narrative in each story because each piece reacts and happens through the word and object interaction. This series is composed by more than 30 small format photographs and the stories that are linked to them that sway between fiction and reality." – Text by Estefania Sokoloff.
Tropicarios Series
Paloma Castello's Tropicarios is an invitation to experience a space in which the fiction and her memories of the tropics blend together to create a personal approximation between our own fictions and those of the artist.
