Hildebrando de Castro

Hildebrando de Castro

Out-Door
Until around 1986, Hildebrando de Castro´s work was more graphic than pictorial, closely related to poster art, cartoons and comic strips, and essentially critical of consumer society. The invasion of domestic space by electronic paraphernalia. The big city: “boxes for living”, the roar of an airplane, loneliness, drigs, beast-object-men. Talking, screaming, discursive images. A cutting electric, speedy, fragmentary style.
In-Door
Toady: velvet curtains, imitation leopard skin cushions, plush shoes, lingerie, necklaces. All that is left of the furniture is one solitary chair serving as throne for a mischievous angel. On the wall, among the curtains: a crucifix and a plaster Christ. On his/her breast shines the Eucharistic heart. But what space is this anyway? Home, whorehouse, theatre, or wax museum?
Front and Back
The large billboard helps camouflage the empty lot, the red light districts, the “favela”. On the billboard’s visible face – the world of fantasy and make believe. Behind it – hard social reality. Hildebrando’s attention is focused on what society rejects or represses – its “blind spaces”. In his paintings, he recreates characters who might inhabit these fringe territories, pariah-communities, the underworld of the disqualified, the crippled and the defeated. Decadence. A universe not too different from the one we find in the photographs of Diane Arbus, the theater of Nelson Rodrigues, or the films of Fassbinder, Herzog, Wim Wneders, Welles, or Buñuel.
The Other Side
She holds the rosary to her breast with one hand and masturbates with the other. Who is this faceless women? Nun, prostitute, or dissatisfied housewife? Hildebrando uses actresses, dancers, quick-change artists, professionals, and his own friends as models. He prepares the scenery, selects the fabrics, and studies light and shadow, bearing in mind (who knows?) canvases by Caravaggio or Georges de la Tour, Spanish “penumbrista” painting, and religious prints. He photographs. Only then, photographs in hand, does he begin work on his enormous pastels. At the end of this operation, there are morbid, sickly, and, some might say, abject images. The perverse documentary of a private, intramural theater, marked by sexual and religious obsession. Ghostly rituals with an expressionist flavor. Madness and death seem to stalk these mask-faces, these hands which sketch their own drama with exceedingly rhetorical gestures.
Languidly, the dwarf poses like Madame Recamier. Two mummifies women appear. Goyaesque or Magrittian simulacra. Far from the sea, looking like a contented procuress, the old lady is transformed into a mermaid. The conscupiscent Fellinian actress offers her breast while, in the foreground, an ephebe peers at us as if seeking approval for the incestuous act. The figures are repellent, their bodies destroyed, eroded by time, their flesh emaciated, devoid of sensuality. On the contrary: these images may be regarded as a meditation on the death and putrefaction of the body.
The Reverse
It is impossible not to let one’s self become enveloped by the strange beauty of these paintings. Technically and formally they are admirable works which reveal the author’s virtuosity. These images depict a unique view of the world, an utterly personal universe (which does not mean an intimate or confessional one). It is a theatrical universe. Pure invention. They are convincing, imposing images. I should even say that these images are lyrical without being sentimental, and their author evinces for his characters an understanding without compassion. After reading Henry Miller I once wrote: they say she (the woman, the painting) is ugly and insulting. To me she is beautiful, she has six fingers, one eye and a limp: I love her.
Among other writers, Georges Bataille demonstrated the existence of a very strong connective link between mystical and erotic excesses. In its own time, the arrogant and tumescent coils of the canopied columns of Saint Peter’s in Rome were seen as a formal erection. Ecstasy runs through the body of Saint Teresa, sculpted in marble by that same Bernini, transforming draped cloth into waves of pleasure.
On the contrary, Hildebrando de Castro seems to repress the latent eroticism of his work through the use of liturgical painting techniques. He is closer to the religious Jansenism of Phillipe de Champaigne than the sensuality of Titian, Rubens or Renoir. Some of the images he has created (his Bergman-like Pietá, his Saint Sebastian, or when he shows his own feet as though they belonged to one crucified) are decidedly ascetic. He manipulates several archetypes of religious painting composition, framing, the arrangement of characters within a scene, lighting, etc. In the end they are solemn, as grave as work in a museum, imposing upon the spectator an attitude of quasi-reverence. If there is anything scandalous about his current work it is not their eroticism, but the religious sentiment which gives them life.

Frederico Morais