Jorge Castillo: a retrospective
JORGE CASTILLO AND THE LANDSCAPES OF THE COLD
Before painting the cities of Sweden, buildings —or rather parts of them peeping out between the trees and bare branches— had already appeared in some of his landscapes of Helsingborg, such as the beautiful royal palace of Sofiero or Villa Solbacka itself, the artist’s residence on the beach at Gravarliden. In these paintings, architecture is usually just one more element of the landscape.
In the Stockholm paintings, however, the city appears as the main subject, almost always in an overall view in which the artist displays his well-known gifts as a virtuoso draughtsman. It is a view emphasised by the vast skies full of cold, with their daytime greys and whites and their night-time blues, through which he achieves another of the most distinctive effects of his painting: the representation of a space that becomes unreal to the eye —sometimes dreamlike— through the transformation of scale. The varied, warm colours of the buildings, among which the domes and spires of the churches stand out, contrast with the icy, abstract monochrome of the skies, offering landscapes in which nature and city coexist without merging, as if protecting themselves from each other, while forming an intense and surprising unity whose mystery is none other than the immense beauty of the passage of Nordic light.
