Standing as a bold and definitive monument of contemporary Latin American documentation, masterfully challenges traditional portrait staging by converting human archives into an authoritarian, architectural statement within the discipline of international fine art male nude photomontage collections. Part of Celso José Castro Daza’s critically acclaimed Guerreros series, this unique physical creation treats the single sheet of archival paper as an analytical laboratory for sub-surface psychological and identity tension. The horizontal and vertical layout tracks an intense graphic rhythm where the prominent referent of Colombian Caribbean art coordinates a labor-intensive matrix of perfectly graduated photographs to construct a monumental man. The arrangement blocks any digital artifice, isolating a crouching warrior model from behind who counters the voyeuristic viewer with an uncompromised bodily tension against dark background shadows, surrounded by blue textile fields and daily ceramic ground textures.
The root of these unique photographic works by the artist Celso Castro occurred when the artist returned from Italy to live back in Colombia in 1987. Castro wanted to produce from the photographs he took with his camera larger versions of those pieces, but having only registered his models with a single photograph it was impossible to achieve, given this need he adopts the language of fractionation completing the message he wants to transmit through his work. Castro perfected his technique throughout the years, now on he takes numbers of photographs of his subject, which are then assembled to conform a unique photo collage without distortion of the main image, gluing all the images on a single sheet of archival paper, the final work consisted of the perfect graduation of many photographs to achieve his monumental man.
Purchase this unique artwork, an investment-quality male nude photomontage created by Celso Castro, through The Art Design Project platform.
Male Nude Photomontage - Confrontación de Ideales, 2002. By Celso Castro
Confrontación de Ideales, 2002
From The series Guerreros
Archival paper & Photographic paper
Dimensions: 27.5 H x 39.5 W in.
Signed, titled and dated by the artist
Unframed
Celso Castro is a referent of Colombian Caribbean art who has been drawing men for more than four decades, studying at the Pratt Institute in New York. In his works, Castro exalts the male genitalia, putting into tension the limits imposed by the sex/gender system that are part of an unquestioned patriarchal and phallocentric order. Most ment the ones he portrays are inhabitants of the Colombian coast, also constructing alternative ways of conceiving Latin American identity. By breaking taboos on corporality and male sexuality, his work has been censored on many occasions due to public accusations of immorality and pornography.
