Eric del Castillo: SCHERZO, Vol.2
Solo exhibition
Opening, Thursday, October 16,2014 at 8:00 pm
Exhibition remains open until November 8, 2014.
Gallery hours Tuesday – Saturday 12:00 – 19:00 h
On Thursday, October 16, 2014, at 8:00 pm at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Trg kralja Tomislava 20, Zagreb, opens the exhibition of Mexican artist Eric del Castillo, Scherzo, Vol. 2.
The exhibition presents a series of around forty objects with applied collages and drawings. All objects are plates made of metal, porcelain or ceramic, all vintage, second hand, already used and found in an attic. Surfaces of the plates are painted with acrylic paint and or graphite, but the main feature are collages, coming from an old illustrated book also found in the attic in Split, shortly after Eric with his family moved to Croatia. This is Eric’s first solo exhibition in Zagreb.
Eric del Castillo (Mexico City, 1962) is a visual artist with many years of experience. He has exhibited in 11 solo exhibitions and over 100 group exhibitions in Mexico, USA, Spain, Germany as well as in Croatia, where he now lives and works. He studied film and painting, but in every medium he works, his work is characterized by collages.
“Piles of magazines, the accumulated volumes of printed paper are waiting to be revived. To take scissors and cut out silhouettes of their environment. To paint by scissors instead of brush, and to weave puzzles of an incomplete set of information fragments. Give life to creatures composed of fragments of time and space. On a blank sheet of paper, the figures find their peace directed by the hand that stops them in a moment of finality. ” Write Neli Ružić and Gonzalo Vélez in a text on Eric’s works.
The images on the plates resemble surreal, dreamy, imaginative, sometimes adventurous, dangerous or deviant, but observing them we remain on the edge between comprehensible / explicable and illogical /mysterious.
Mexican curator Carlos Aranda Marquez on Eric’s earlier work says, “Eric is a filmmaker on paper, we are voyeurs on his „storyboards“, of that private world where the artist has abducted fragments of nanosecond of images, and he has edited them for his movie.”
“The scenes, people and landscapes on plates we recognize as on the border between the poetic, ironic, dramatic or humorous. Albeit they are leaving an impression as if they were from an unknown or at least a distant world / time, they in fact can often be identified as already known, or the like characters, but we still remain in the gap in between deciphering and understanding what’s really going on.” writes J. Vukmir in the catalogue foreword.
With this exhibition of Eric del Castillo at the Institute for Contemporary Art begins an intensive effort of the Institute aiming to support foreign artists living in Croatia to integrate better into a relatively closed local cultural scene.
The exhibition remains open until November 8, 2014, and is open during gallery hours from Tuesday to Saturday between 12:00 and 19:00.
Photos: Miranda Čikotić
Curated by Janka Vukmir.
The exhibition was funded by Croatian Ministry of Culture.
Eric del Castillo
SCHERZO, Vol.2
Solo exhibition
Opening, Thursday, October 16,2014 at 8:00 pm
Exhibition remains open until November 8, 2014.
Gallery hours Tuesday – Saturday 12:00 – 19:00 h