Discovering Enrique Castanon

With a passion for articulating the unknown, Enrique Castanon's work presents a whirlwind of unexpected emotions and dramas, inspired from everyday life. The experience of a swimmer in an urban situated pool becomes a myriad of sky, sound and color: the distant call of electrified city life filtered through the sensuous calm of deep waters. This is "Emergency (A Swimmer)" a subtle and skillful blending of racy colors and atmospheric hues. What stands out is the graphic patterning and strong balance between the palpable and the abstract. Energy is contained in the somewhat square composition, allowing the rich combinations of colors and forms to be read in a variety of angles and positions. This is the dynamism in Castanon's art, that it does not begin anywhere in particular and instead, throws the viewer right into the midst of a happening, a circumstance, a heady charge.

The Mask

Inside this complex capsule, Castanon professes to be a colorist and an emotional painter at heart. Though the formal qualities in art interest him, he has reached a point where he no longer considers at length these details, but instead paints as a storyteller in the abstract does, beginning at the beginning and perhaps, not thinking about where it will end. Many of his early works show strong Expressionistic and Fauve tendencies, inspired from Kandinsky and Matisse as he himself affirms. It is the combination of these two artistic directions that present fundamental strengths in Castanon's art. The focus on directness of color and a sumptuous lyricism of line shows in many pieces (Fauvism), while a strong relationship between color and emotion is projected in each work (Expressionism). Without warning, Castanon reaches beyond: he provides a link to his viewers by adding a figure or a face, a representational component that drives the dramatic composition of any work a well as disrupts its harmonic expression. "Microcosmos" subtly layers an amphibious creature, dominating most of the dramatic stance, while its presence is layered with a human face and scattered buildings infused with simultaneous earth, sky, sea, daylight and dusk. Bottled life, if one could label the art, like taking an empty vessel and scooping it through the air, fastening the widget and letting it settle... Castanon plays with images and thoughts, but also physical sensations, moving your eye this way and that, opening the boundaries of your imagination.

Century Bug

The playful interlude continues with "A Corporate Incident" and "The Mask", where the human faces featured again dominate, but are subtly challenged with graphic disguises or expressions, implying sound and movement, inviting desire and speculation across the dense canvas surface. The demands of Castanon's aesthetic show in the brief but not yet ended dalliance with acetate and polycarbonate in his art making. His command of the line and its coauthorship of space relieve the eye of a mere two-dimensional tension. Executed in layers, Castanon's plastic-based works explore the physical limits of applied color on carved swirls, dancing with their own shadows, while concealing and revealing a drawn figurative image or a suggestive composition.

A key development in Enrique Castanon's art is his continued renewal of the coloring process. Though the flashes of color are spontaneous and accorded the mood and spirit of the artwork, it is clear that the fusion and fission of the graduated hues are not. These latter are the result of skill and a deep, inspired familiarity with the nature and behavior of color in any composition, on any surface. This is evident in "Century Bug", Castanon's favorite work by his own admission. The touches of fire and ice in the reds and blues play with apocalyptic notions in a suspected subject while a strong black graphic illustrating an insect adds another dimension of time and space. The different components of entomological or human evolution rushing through time and enduring bring Castanon and us to a new space. The urban setting is displaced to the top right as an enveloping cocoon reaches to draw us in, preparing for a metamorphosis of age and wisdom, body and soul.

Perhaps the final word (and not exclusively so) for Enrique Castanon's art is transformation. Far from being a simple notion of growth or change, transformation in this art signifies and presents parallel visual possibilities. It is an art discovering movement in the forcefulness of line and excitement in the briskness of color. The intimate touches of fantasy in the creative response of making art provide a new window into even newer, undiscovered but vivid realities.

By Bridget Tracy Tan
Director S.E.Asian Art Institute
Singapore

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