EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

The work of David Castro moves within a territory of displacement and continuity. Born in Peru and based in Barcelona for four decades, Castro’s artistic language is shaped by migration, cultural experience, and his eclectical position is placed between biography and abstraction, visual arts and invisibility. His paintings resist immediate classification, and a political position: they move between figuration and dissolution, material and non-material, gestural impulse and structural discipline, purpose and serendipity. In this exhibition, conceived for Paris (Boulevard Saint Michel on September 2026), the selected works form a coherent visual essay on memory. As Picasso turned to so-called “Primitive Art” not as imitation but as a strategy to destabilize Western rationalism, Castro approaches memory not as documentation but as reconstruction..

Works in the exhibition

In Entre le Ciel et la Spatule, David Castro-Miranda proposes a cartography of memory through gesture. The five works selected for this curatorial focus, Route de Caraz, …peut-être Norvège, Dans ma forêt imaginaire, À contre-courant, and Mer avec nuages  form a coherent investigation into landscape not as representation, but as embodied recollection.

Executed primarily in Plakkaatverf gouache applied with a spatula on 280 grams Michel paper, these works transform pigment into relief. The surface is not illustrative; it is geological. Color becomes terrain. Gesture becomes altitude.

The chromatic range is intentionally restricted to only five essential components, the primary colors, black, and white, establishing a genetic code that runs through the entire body of work. This reduction works as structural coherence, ensuring that each landscape is built from the same chromatic values while allowing infinite atmospheric variations through density, layering, and gesture.

Landscape as Memory Structure

Instead of work in plein-air, Castro, deliberated, does not paint what he sees. He paints what remains in his memory. Route de Caraz (2023), referencing the Andean region of Peru, does not describe topographical accuracy. Instead, thick ochres and compressed whites rise in ridged formations, the spatula carving through pigment like wind cutting mountain stone.

The vertical pressure of the tool creates stratified edges, echoing the tectonic formations of the Andes. Here, the spatula functions not merely as instrument, but as metaphorical force , erosion and construction simultaneously.

This material density establishes the structural axis of the exhibition: landscape understood as physical memory. A sustained pressure, deliberate gestures, and the directional force of the spatula evoke the movement of sea, clouds, and mountains, not as representation, but as embodied experience.

The Imagined Norway

In …peut-être Norvège (2023), the palette shifts dramatically. Cool greys, diluted blues, and restrained whites dominate the composition. The title itself destabilizes certainty , “perhaps Norway.” Geography becomes hypothetical.

Formally, the work operates through horizontal compression. The spatula flattens and drags pigment, creating a sensation of distant horizon. The paint surface is less mountainous than atmospheric, yet still tactile.

The piece enters into dialogue with the European Romantic marine tradition while consciously removing its narrative theatrics. Ships and figures disappear, leaving only atmospheric chromatic fields. Norway becomes not a geographic statement but an emotional register, a remembered luminosity shaped by distance and absence. Emerging from lived experience and imaginative reconstruction, the work speaks of hybrid identity: intuitive rather than analytical, unmediated rather than conceptually engineered.

The contrast between Route de Caraz and …peut-être Norvège reveals a central dialectic: altitude versus horizon; interior heat versus diffused northern luminosity.

The Forest That Does Not Exist

Dans ma forêt imaginaire (2023) marks a conceptual shift and subtle displacement within the exhibition. Unlike mountain or sea, the forest is explicitly declared imaginary, dissolving any remaining geographic anchorage. Here Castro abandons external cartography in favor of constructed interiority, generating a form of alternative realism in which the imaginary acquires material presence. What does not exist in territory becomes tangible on paper. In this sense, the work resonates, conceptually rather than illustratively, with the logic of Magical Realism as articulated by Gabriel García Márquez: a reality in which the invented and the lived coexist without hierarchy, and the improbable assumes natural validity.

The spatula strokes become more vertical, interrupted, almost natural. Dark greens and deep blues are layered with intrusions of lighter pigment. The surface feels less stable, more enclosed.

Historically, the forest occupies a symbolic role in European painting , from Romanticism to Symbolism , as a space of introspection and sublimity. Castro reinterprets this lineage through material immediacy. The forest is not sublime in the classical sense; it is constructed from memory fragments.

The absence of perspectival depth reinforces this psychological interpretation. The viewer does not enter the forest; instead, one confronts its surface, dense, opaque, resistant. It appears both distant and disarmingly close at once. Theoretically, the spectator remains outside the pictorial space, imaginatively inhabits it. The body stands in front of the work; the mind moves within it.

Gesture Against Current

With À contre-courant (2023), gesture becomes explicit. The composition abandons stable landscape references and instead emphasizes directional force. Diagonal movements of pigment oppose each other across the surface.

Here, the influence of North American gestural abstraction becomes perceptible, yet filtered through the discipline of the spatula rather than the brush. The tool’s resistance produces thicker, more decisive marks.

The current in question is both literal and metaphorical: water, migration, artistic tradition, personal history. The piece serves as hinge within the exhibition , moving from geographic memory toward existential essence.

This work insists on friction. Pigment collides. Surface tension increases.

Sea and Sky in Suspension

Finally, Mer avec nuages (2021), executed in mixed technique, expands the chromatic field. The composition dissolves the boundary between sea and sky, recalling the exhibition’s title , between the sky and the spatula.

The layered application suggests marine tradition, yet without illustrative specificity. Clouds are not modeled; they emerge through layered transparency. The sea is not described; it is implied by tonal gradation.

This piece integrates lessons from the previous four works: the material relief of Route de Caraz, the atmospheric restraint of …peut-être Norvège, the density of Dans ma forêt imaginaire, and the dynamic force of À contre-courant.

Technical Language as Conceptual Argument

The repeated use of Plakkaatverf gouache is significant. Traditionally associated with graphic clarity, here it becomes sculptural. Applied with spatula, the paint thickens into ridges and valleys. Drying properties allow rapid layering, reinforcing immediacy.

Michel 280 grams paper absorbs resists the pigment, producing interactions between surface and relief accumulation.

The spatula, in six of the nine works of the exhibition and central to these five, becomes an extension of bodily force. It is architectural.

Consequently, technique is not aesthetic choice but structural language.

Between Continents

These five works articulate a transcontinental dialogue: Peru, imagined Scandinavia, interior Spain, the abstract current of migration, and the universal sea.

Castro’s pictorial identity is neither exotic nor derivative. It inhabits multiple visual traditions without fragmentation. The Andes coexist with European marine memory; gestural abstraction intersects with romantic atmosphere.

The exhibition ultimately proposes that contemporary identity is stratified , like paint applied and reworked on paper. Landscapes become autobiography without literal narrative.

Between altitude and tide, between certainty and imagination, the spatula draw geography.

Words: 1.156