Bang Art, #8
Delitto Castillo: An Interview with Victor Castillo
By Filippo Brunamonti (Italy)

“The exhibition Restless and Wild is about a vision of the world that is ‘innocent, wild, and cruel’, like children can be when they play. Like all of us can be. I feel more like I am a witness than speaking of personal things.”
[Restless and Wild, es sobre una visión del mundo ‘inocente, salvaje y cruel’, como pueden ser los niños cuando juegan. Podemos ser todos. Me siento más como un testigo, que hablando sobre cosas personales.]

The Colors of the Underground:
Beyond Pop Surrealism
By Juan S. Luna (Spain)

“Riding between Barcelona and Santiago, Chile, Victor Castillo has signed up to today more than three-hundred paintings in which cruelty and innocence are drawn with unusual mastery, irony, and a critical vision of the world in which we live. Up to today he has exhibited in cities such as Barcelona, Berlin, Los Angeles, and London.” [Translated from Spanish]

“Victor Castillo doesn’t mess around. He shoots straight to the core, unrooting current and historic horrors of the species known as humanity. He rips issues up out of our collective suffering and expresses them with the chiaroscuro contrasts of an X-ray. Victor feels that there is a delicate line separating good and evil; his work suggests that he toes the line.”

LOW Kunstmagazin, No. 5
Interview by Danny Winkler (Germany)

“From 1991 on I went through different art schools. I left all of them, disappointed, until I ended up attending the worst one: The Catholic School of Arts. The incompatibility was so big, I was finally expelled. You can imagine what it feels like, to study arts in a place where you can’t talk about sex, religion
or politics. It makes no sense at all.”

Copying Eden: Recent Art in Chile
By Gerardo Mosquera (Chile)

“‘Children are often cruel out of their own innocence’ is the quote from Saint Augustine, which opens the catalog of Victor Castillo’s show Children OFF Revolution (Barcelona, 2005). This work combines a parody of the supposedly idyllic world of childhood with a criticism of the globalized industrial icons which are imposed on children’s imagination. It also contains the aesthetic of comics and cartoons in all their expressive power.” [Translated from Spanish]

HI-FRUCTOSE, Vol. 8
Victor Castillo's Appetite for Destruction
By Kirsten Anderson (USA)

“Victor Castillo’s vision is prompted by the injustices and hypocrisy perpetuated by the questionable promises of capitalism, global politics, and religion rampant in the world today. He states, ‘I don’t adopt any political militancy. I try to have a wide and critical approach to politics in general, paying attention to the apolitical position. I deeply mistrust both politics and religion.’ But clearly his work is influenced by much introspection and investigation into the workings of human interaction and power plays through history.”

EL PÁIS
The Triumph of Pop Surrealism
By Xavi Sancho (Spain)

“Victor Castillo is a child of the Seventies, of comics, of Mazinger Z, of Pop as clandestine culture in a society marked by autarchy and the violence inherent to dictatorship. He grew up in a neighborhood that he remembers as ‘brave’. His work touches paintings and illustration, and it assumes without complexities classical references and that which have been called Pop Surrealism, most of all in its bloody and political aspects. Violence in primary colors.” [Translated from Spanish, Nov. 2007]

Salir, Salir, Número 79
By Julián Elliot (Spain)

“A child’s world has the seeds of what is to come. ‘Violence in the media transforms children, the adults of the future,’ Victor Castillo affirms, ‘We reap what we sow.’ Frustration faced with the world, a certain impotence with regards to the conditions of society today are motivations behind his work. ‘For this reason I show a tragic-comic vision of reality.’” [Translated from Spanish]