THE Alcalá Room 31 of the Community of Madrid inaugurated The space between the fingersan exhibition that brings together a selection of works that Jacobo Castellano has created over the past two decades and which delves into his own artistic experience based on autobiographical memory.
Organized by Tania Pardo, director of the Dos de Mayo Art Center Museum of Mostoles (CA2M)The exhibition is presented as a journey of sculptural and pictorial works. The visitor can begin the journey of the exhibition by crossing two doors that recreate on a larger scale those designed by Secundino Zuazo, architect who built in Madrid in 1931 The House of Flowerscurrent residence of the artist. In this way, he generates a nod to his autobiographysince this is not the first time that Jacobo Castellano use family memory and the memory of the production of some of his works, as he explains when speaking of the city where he spent the summers of his childhood: “Villargordo It was a cathartic space for me that allowed me to discover many things about my story and what would be the main theme of my production: family memory, childhood and history of objects“, confirms Jacobo Castellano.
Furthermore, in this exhibition, the artist takes up painting techniquewhich he had abandoned during his academic training after a poisoning. In this sense, Castellano, as part of the working process of this exhibition, He visited the Prado Museum every week using the most remarkable paintings in this gallery – mainly from Goya and Zurbaran– as an observation exercise and a necessary learning tool to approach the pictorial language, which is reflected in the paintings exhibited in The Space Between the Fingers. The artist carefully studied the details and incorporated them into his works through games of symbols in dialogue with sculptural practice.
The artist also includes other characteristic elements in his production such as milk, to which he is allergic, or oil. In addition, it presents for the first time a series of drawings exhibited on the first floor in dialogue with the sculptures.
The title of the show, The space between the fingersrefers to a child’s game in which the thumb of the hand disappears. This reference is visible thanks to a large sculpture of two hands carved in ebony, connected by a steel cable. This way, Castellano shows his love for reconstructing objects that recall childhooda technique that he applies in other works in the exhibition and which facilitates object associations.
In conclusion, The exhibition reflects on the use of pictorial and sculptural language and all these concepts that revolve around artistic practice, such as balance and tension between formsthe use of different materials and the Western history of painting itself.
Jacobo Castellano born in Jaén in 1976currently resides and works in Madrid. Is Graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Granada. Spanish is considered to be one of the Spanish artists with the greatest projection on the contemporary art scene.
Jacobo Castellano’s work revolves around family memory, childhood and the history contained in the various objects that he searches for and saves with astonishing intuition, recontextualizing them and giving them new meanings. Through his work, composed of sculptures – essentially made of wood – installations, photographs and paintingsThe artist manages to load his works with different meanings.
