“Contenedores, sepulcros y personajes” (Containers, sepulchers and characters) is the title of the first solo exhibition of Jacobo Castellano (Jaen, 1976) at the Galería Rafael Ortiz in Seville. The title helps us situate the three themes that make up this exhibition, which show the artist’s interest in delving into his own biography and investigating historical-artistic aspects of his environment, which, at the same time, evidences his interest in the use and relationship between objects.

A year ago the artist began to build a series of containers that he called “milk containers”. The series continues and some of them can be seen in this exhibition. There is nothing better than rescuing an excerpt from a conversation with the artist to understand the reason for these sculptures: “Milk is poison for me. I am allergic to lactose. If I drink a glass of milk, I’m likely to die. This fact makes it especially attractive to me: a liquid that nourished me as a child and allowed me to grow up healthy, suddenly becomes something certainly dangerous. I wondered how to pay tribute to it. I then thought of building a series of containers to somehow ‘deposit’ and ‘preserve’ the poison. A schizophrenic perversity of no importance [laughs]. Milk containers or toxic containers. Who knows.”

If the “milk containers” contain poison, the “sepulchers”, since ancient times, preserve inert bodies. Those of the church of San Francisco de Betanzos are of great artistic and iconographic interest. Castellano fixes his attention on the set of tombs that are arranged in the side chapels. These funerary monuments have a common element: hunting dogs. Placed at the feet of each one of the illustrious characters, these dogs appear as one more attribute that symbolizes the greatness of each person. The peculiarity here is that they appear imprisoned between the boots of the deceased and the very architecture that delimits the sepulcher, always awake, as if waiting to hear the shot of their master that leads them to chase a wounded prey. Castellano’s interest in these tombs is captured in a series of photographs that represent these absurd scenes that seem to be an error in the conception and design of the tomb.

Finally, the “characters” are placed in the space as observers. Anthropomorphic sculptures built from found wood and objects that Castellano has collected over the years, some related to games, such as bowling balls and others related to craft activities such as shoemaking. The author himself has commented that these characters are nothing more than a representation of himself as a loser.

Jacobo Castellano studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Granada, completing his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, as well as at the ISCP in New York. He has exhibited his work at the Kunsthalle in São Paulo, at the Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo (Artium), at the Fundación RAC in Pontevedra and at the Palacio de Fonseca, University of Salamanca, among other institutions.