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An Artist from Animus Jocandi Exhumes the Networks of Hypocrisy in Contemporary Spain in Three New Works
MADRID, [02/03/2026] — In the tradition of Goya’s Disparates and the tragic lucidity of the picaresque novel, an artist linked to the renowned satirical publication Animus Jocandi presents three works that transcend graphic humor to delve into the realm of social archaeology. The exhibition, titled «Three Autopsies,» proposes an exercise in dissecting Spanish reality through drawing, applying a gaze that draws equally from contemporary sociology, the most critical artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century, and, fundamentally, from current debates on the decolonization of art and thought.
Far from the immediacy of the daily newspaper cartoon, these three pieces are presented as «diagrams of power.» Each stroke is not an opinion, but the visualization of a complex network of actors—human and non-human—that upholds the contradictions of a society that has yet to fully question its colonial past and its continuities in the present. The artist acts as a forensic pathologist: lifting the skin of the obvious to show us the tendons of institutional hypocrisy and the unresolved legacies of history.
Three Works, Three Networks, Three Autopsies
The exhibition is structured around three large-format pieces, accompanied by preparatory sketches, press documents, and conceptual maps that break down the «ecosystem» of each image.
The first work is a direct assault on one of the most sacrosanct pillars of Spanish identity: bullfighting. The image shows a bullfighter at the precise moment of driving the sword home. His face, contorted by a mix of fury and patriotic fervor, screams: «This is culture, dammit. Cul-ture.»
The work deconstructs the myth of individual artistry. The bullfighter is not an isolated subject, but a node in a network that includes: the stands (the public that legitimizes it with its gaze), public subsidies (money flowing from conservative administrations), television cameras (packaging death as folklore), and, above all, the very word «culture,» turned into a rhetorical shield that shields violence from criticism.
Bullfighting is not just a tradition: it is a direct legacy of imperial Spain, which exported this practice to its American colonies as a mark of civilized identity. The cry «this is culture» resonates with the colonial discourse that imposed its own practices as superior, erasing the worldviews of indigenous peoples for whom the relationship with animals was based not on ritualized sacrifice but on reciprocity. The work questions: what violences do we naturalize when we call them «culture»? What other forms of relationship with the living were exterminated so that this spectacle could establish itself as a hallmark of national identity?
The second image is a nightmarish détournement. A man pushes a wheelchair carrying his elderly mother towards the gates of a nursing home. Above the lintel, a wrought iron arch reproduces the most infamous inscription of the 20th century: «Work sets you free.» The son reassures his mother: «Don’t worry, it’s one of the best privately managed nursing homes in Madrid.»
The network visualized here is that of neoliberal governmentality: the outsourcing contracts of the Community of Madrid, the investment funds that own the nursing homes, the bureaucracy that classified the elderly as «beds,» and the personal protective equipment that never arrived. The work forces us to ask: what chain of actors turns a nursing home into a geriatric concentration camp?
This work is a perfect example of the Situationist technique of détournement, as defined by Guy Debord: taking an element from the enemy (the phrase from Auschwitz, the rhetoric of business excellence) and turning it against him to reveal its monstrous truth. The artist does not invent a new horror; he simply rearranges existing signs so that they reveal their hidden kinship.
The third work finds pitch-black humor in the housing crisis. Under a bridge, two homeless men share a blanket and cardboard. One says to the other: «With all this squatting business, those scoundrels who break into your house… at times like this, good thing I don’t have an apartment.»
The network that unfolds is immense: the empty apartments owned by banks, non-human actors that speculate; the politicians who stoke fear of squatting to divert attention from their housing policies; the media that amplify isolated cases; and finally these two men, excluded from property ownership, watching the storm from the outdoors.
This piece connects with the tradition of Spanish critical realism, from the picaresque novel to the cinema of Berlanga, where the marginalized are the only ones capable of seeing the absurdity of the system clearly. But it also resonates with Arte Povera in its attention to the materials of exclusion: cardboard, the blanket, asphalt. The «poor» is not just the medium, but the lives of those who inhabit it.
Conclusion
Together, «Three Autopsies» proposes a redefinition of political graphic humor. It is no longer about telling jokes, but about mapping the real and, specifically, mapping the colonial continuities that persist in the present. The artist assumes the role of archaeologist, unearthing layers of meaning that official rhetoric has buried: ritualized violence as «culture,» institutional neglect as «efficient management,» housing exclusion as «defense of property.»
The exhibition engages with contemporary debates on the decolonization of museums and cultural institutions, but does so from an uncomfortable position: it does not limit itself to pointing out the plunder of archaeological pieces or the stereotypical representation of other cultures, but shows how colonial logic continues to operate at the very heart of public policies and everyday discourse.
Each work invites the viewer to trace the threads that compose it, to become a detective of their own reality. In a time of information saturation and widespread cynicism, these three images offer something rare and valuable: the possibility of seeing clearly the power structures that constitute us and the unresolved legacies that inhabit us.
Estimado Jon,
El podcast que hace una exploración no solo de voz sino también de la visualidad se refiere a tres trabajos gráficos muy concretos los cuales son incluidos en el video.
Lo primero que salta a la vista es la calidad de la obra gráfica y de su efectividad como viñeta. El torero que afirma que lo que hace es cul-tu-ra en el momento de matar al toro, el de la anciana que se enfrenta a un nuevo espacio de cuidad prometedor que guarda un secreto sórdido o el diálogo jocoso y crítico de los indigentes que se alegran de no tener casa. Los tres operan en un registro visual de un género gráfico que se conoce bien y que se nutren de elementos narrativos que con cuentagotas se refieren de manera crítica pero jocosa a la realidad.
Extraño un poco más de elaboración de los referentes, desde el Roto hasta Berlanga, esos referentes son necesarios, expanden la comprensión de las piezas y no son simplemente cultismos. Elaborar más sobre ellos sería muy interesante y necesario. El siguiente reto tratará en parte sobre ello.
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Estimada Marta,
La descripción de tu obra se puede describir como una modulación de a voz desde el grito hasta el susurro. Desde lo político a lo personal, no parece existir una frontera entre ellas y su articulación se refiere en última instancia a temas como la salud mental.
Tu interés por la situación política militar del lenguaje político le da forma y contenido al primer proyecto descrito. Las proyecciones digitales sobre la naturaleza para confrontar al espectador manifestando que las excusas no son biodegradables resulta a la vez provocador y lúcido.
El tono de la descripción cambia un poco cuando se refiere al refugio de la identidad, donde se explora una obra que quizás pueda ser la base del TFG. Ahí se articula el pop, el surrealismo y lo naif, se trata de un trabajo pictórico para explorar elementos propios de la cultura contemporánea como la ansiedad. Dentro de esta serie la pieza de las jaulas simétricas sobre la falta de empatía parece ser la más contundente y elocuente.
Hace falta un elemento clave del ejercicio y es poner en diálogo la obra con los referentes y las influencias artísticas.
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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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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Buenas tardes David,
No encuentro el podcast que hace parte del Reto 1. ¿Me puedes decir dónde está publicado?
Saludos,
Andrés Burbano
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Este es un espacio de trabajo personal de un/a estudiante de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Cualquier contenido publicado en este espacio es responsabilidad de su autor/a.
Estimado David,
En el podcast la propuesta sobre el paisaje como un fenómeno con fuerte anclaje interior que a su vez puede ser la base de un trabajo plástico queda claramente presentada.
Las referencias concretas al trabajo pictórico son pertinentes y evocativas, como el uso de la espátula como herramienta geológica para buscar estratos intentando reflejar una experiencia corporal que va desde la falta de oxígeno hasta la sensación de inmensidad. Así, Noruega puede ser más que un lugar físico, un lugar imaginario que se destila a través del trabajo pictórico.
En efecto, las cinco obras que presenta a través de la narración como material plástico se entienden como desplazamientos, desplazamientos entre tradición romántica europea y cultura latinoamericana, por ejemplo.
Aunque encontramos referencias artísticas a movimientos particulares como al realismo mágico o la abstracción gestual del siglo XX, por mencionar dos, estas influencias pueden ser exploradas un poco más en detalle buscando un balance entre la descripción de la propia obra y lo que ella toma de otros lados.