As in the paintings of Tomás Castaño, there are days of half-closed sky, with a gone-for-a-break sign hanging, packed with cumulus clouds drifting lost in thought among their innocent condensations, with no apparent threat of a downpour. Today we get a breather, they seem to announce. They are days that soothe the blinding intensity of unbroken light, of the summer's hurry to be gone.
They arrive and flood the air with that faint feeling of ‘déjà vu’, the one that comes with eternally returning to the same thresholds. Thresholds that in fact only live on now in the canvases and photographs of those exhibitions with the same old label: “the city as it was”. Images condemned to decorate corners that, every now and then, draw in some stray visitor keen to exclaim once again “look how much we've grown” or “how we've changed”.
Much of the artwork of Tomás Castaño (Santander, 1953) is an effort to take us back to those picturesque doorways of shops, pharmacies, taverns or cafés, by now practically gone or on the brink of extinction, wiped out, flattened and standardised by the steamroller of our era's heartless franchises. The character of those old structures, the calm of those doorways carefully and realistically drawn, announced welcoming spaces even in the grey monotony of dead calm. Places where it wasn't all help yourself, pay up and clear the space as soon as you can for the next one.
Self-taught and with more than forty years of enthusiastic devotion to the brushes, Tomás Castaño, though focused on capturing the architecture mentioned above, also shows a certain taste for other kinds of landscape. Among them there are plenty of scenes of Santander, his home city, along with its inseparable El Sardinero beach. As well as the depiction of other landscapes with polluted skies, of maritime scenes, of high-voltage pylons crossing the countryside, the twists of some back street in deserted towns or still lifes pared down to their bare essentials. Landscapes all of them charged, mind you, with the slow, restrained light of his perpetually overcast skies. The style of Castaño's realist brushwork also gives way, in some of his artworks, to certain flirtations with more conceptual styles.
Tomás Castaño has shown his artwork in group exhibitions in several countries such as Germany, Holland, France, Argentina, Japan and Italy, as well as in numerous solo and group exhibitions all over Spain. In 2005 he represented Cantabria at the Florence Biennale. That same year he was included among the 20 best artworks in the Salón de Invierno at Galería Esart in Barcelona, and in 2011 he was awarded first prize in the competition of the Asociación de Emprendedores de las Artes y las Letras in Valencia. Among other galleries, he has artwork permanently on show at Bellarte Gallery in Seoul (Korea), Galería Sharon-León, Colorida Gallery in Lisbon, El Claustre Galería d'Art-Girona, Galería Montsequi-Madrid, Galería Este-Santander and Espacio 36-Zamora.
More about Tomás Castaño and his artwork here!
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