SURREALISM NOW! presents

  VINCENT CASTIGLIA

                                http://www.omegatattoo.com

Vincent Castiglia: Existential Visionary Artist

Castiglia's paintings are monochromatic tableaux examining life, death, and the human condition. While many surrealists cite fantasy or dreams as their inspiration, Castiglia’s canvases are connected to a life story which is highly allegorical.

The archetypal figures in Castiglia’s work embody the inevitable finitude of human existence. The viewer is presented with the symbiosis of birth and death in pictorial form.  The images themselves, as he sees them, form as crystallizations of his experiences, freed from the psyche. The subject’s mortality is delineated in diverse.

Every one of us, as an individual, is responsible—responsible for what we do, responsible for who we are, responsible for the way we face and deal with the world, responsible, ultimately, for the way the world is.

It is, in a very short phrase, the philosophy of 'no excuses!' We cannot shift that burden onto God, or nature, or the ways of the world.

But neither the understanding of death nor its emotive accompaniment opens up a specific task for man, a way to transform his own situation in the world. They enable him only to perceive the common destiny to which all men are subject; and they offer to him, therefore, the possibility of remaining faithful to this destiny and of freely accepting the necessity that all men share in common. In this fidelity consists the historicity of existence, which is the repetition of tradition, the return to the possibilities from which existence had earlier been constituted, the wanting for the future what has been in the past. And in this historicity participate not only man but all of the things of the world, in their utilizability and instrumentality, and even the totality of Nature as the locus of history.

Castiglia’s work can be viewed as an examination of the human experience, caught in a cycle of inevitable decay and biological futility. The juxtaposition of living and dead tissue (rendered in his own biological tissue), suggests a humanity which is itself infirmed, self-perpetuating, and ultimately destructive. While these existentialist notions are conveyed, the undercurrent themes of victory and survival run forcibly through each painting. The work’s capacity to simultaneously attract and repel is evidence of Castiglia’s ability to use blood to transmit something other than fear – as a pathway for the realization and relation of truth (the artist’s truth as well as one more universal). Through his work, the viewer is forced into a re-acquaintance with life and urgency that might not otherwise take place.

The viewer is not only allowed to see into the figure, but also through it, into a deeper psychological world.

Vincent Castiglia is the 1^st American artist to receive a solo exhibition invitation from Oscar Award-winning artist H.R. Giger in the history of the H. R. Giger Museum Gallery. The exquisite museum, located in the Château St. Germain (Gruyeres, Switzerland), furnished a cordial reception for Castiglia’s inaugural body of work, Remedy for the Living. Remedy for the Living, the 1^st solo exhibition of paintings by Vincent Castiglia opened on November 1^st 2008 and ran for 6 months, closing in April of 2009.

His work hangs in many distinguished international collections; one of his most celebrated works of 2006, “Gravity” was recently acquired by Rock legend Gregg Allman.

Castiglia’s works on paper have been exhibited at museums and galleries in the US, Switzerland and England, including in the 2006 group exhibition of the Society for Art of Imagination at The HR Giger Museum Gallery, Switzerland, Last Rites Gallery (New York) The Museum of Sex (New York), The Mall Gallery (London, England) Canvas Los Angeles (Los Angeles California), Fuse Gallery (New York), Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center (Ft. Myers, Florida), Art @ Large Gallery (New York) Gallery Lombardi (Austin Texas), L’imagerie Gallery (Hollywood, California),  C-Pop Gallery (Detroit, Michigan), Shooting Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Seed Gallery (Newark, New Jersey) and The 7th Annual Dirty Show (Detroit, Michigan), The Congregation Gallery (Hollywood, California), It was in a group show at the Ludlow Gallery in NYC that Castiglia’s work received its first violent compliment, having the art stolen right from gallery wall.


The art of Vincent Castiglia has been featured on New York 1 News as well as the television series, “Miami Ink”. His work has been explored by numerous art and culture, and media publications, both in the US and internationally, including the New York Post, and the recently released, Lexikon Der Phantastischen Künstler “The international encyclopedia of fantastic, surrealistic, symbolist, & visionary artists”

Castiglia lives and works in New York City, and is a member of The Society for Art of Imagination.

MEDIUM:

The entire collection of paintings by Vincent Castiglia is created exclusively in his own blood (which anhydrates as “iron oxide“).

Blood is technically considered to be a tissue. It is made up of approximately 55% plasma, a yellowish clear fluid, which is 90% water by volume. Castiglia’s figures, their musculature and skin, are painted with what could be thought of as “liquid flesh”. Its tendency to quicken the subjects is likely inapproachable by any other medium---as it is actual tissue with which it is being rendered. In this way the subject’s realism is not merely an optical illusion due to it’s level of detail, but rather is an actual transference of flesh and blood to each work.

In the privacy of his studio, Castiglia practices a kind of modern-day phlebotomy, siphoning the life force which contains his own psychic energy, while giving it an outlet and form. In doing so, he dissolves the barrier between artist and art in a most literal and immediate sense.

“As soon as we begin to exist as organic matter, our material state begins seeking a return to the first state from which it came, on several levels, through life processes. Our particles seem borrowed, as if only for a moment in the breadth of eternity. Our bodies appear, soak up and contain the vital fluid of existence, to give it shape and form, only then to relinquish this substance as to “wring out” the life force from a worn out “flesh-suit” back into the void. As I see it, blood is a sacred creative agent, and through its use in my work I feel that I am connecting on the most direct level with the essence of life. That life will persist after my body no longer does, and in this sense…I’ll never die.”