Ruben Castillo
Our Pillows (Monday, at 7:37 AM), 2018, etching on paper, 12" x 15"
“Being afraid but being curious has an ability to drive us forward. I’ve always been curious about how we navigate the world and how things color our experience of life.”
Ruben Castillo is an artist living and working in Kansas City, Missouri (USA). His approach to color is minimal and monochromatic, and his approach to printmaking is slow and meditative. His intimate, quiet and sensitive work is created with intaglio-based methods such as etching and engraving. Ruben also creates work in the mediums of drawing, video and installation, and his research has a focus on queerness and the ordinary. Currently Ruben is working on a portfolio of etchings titled, “One Week in Spring”.
How does color represent or support the mind space of your work?
A lot of my work is monochromatic due to me admittedly being a small chromophobe! Color is a powerful element full of so many theories and uses that it’s very intimidating to me. I’m at a loss when trying to figure out color, but I’ve been getting more attuned to both my fear and respect for being lost. When I was a kid, I was very investigative and curious. After all of my family would go to sleep, I would wander out into the dark house late at night, never turning on a light. I would creep through our small home quietly and blindly, feeling my way (literally, I was using my hands to see!) and with a little bit of fear of not wanting to be caught. I usually just wanted a snack. Being afraid but being curious has an ability to drive us forward. I’ve always been curious about how we navigate the world and how things color our experience of life.
Pink Couch Fantasy (full series), 2018, watercolor on paper, 9" x 9" each.
“I’m at a loss when trying to figure out color, but I’ve been getting more attuned to both my fear and respect for being lost.”
Drawing of Our Closet (Love Notes), 2017, mixed media installation, approx. 60" x 70" x 15"
What cultural aspects of color are built into your work?
Another major component to my work is white and I was once asked, “Why is there so much white in your work?” I’m a biracial queer person: my dad’s side is Mexican with some European roots and my mom is White. I was never taught Spanish and I felt this huge disconnect growing up around Dallas, TX where it was majority Brown. White was so much of a default to me learning art but also learning how to be in the world. I just started reading José Esteban Muñoz’s final book called The Sense of Brown, compiled from essays and talks he delivered before his death in 2013. Muñoz deviates from the often still-too-specific associations of latinidad and insteads approaches Brownness more inclusively as being about collective feelings. Thinking about color as this objective thing able to do another thing as it interacts with other objects opens up so many possibilities.
I did this sculptural piece called Drawing of Our Closet where I created a reproduction of my closet using the same commercially available hardware. I took these objects and painted them all white and then stained everything with powdered graphite using my own hands. I thought about how these objects were neutralized then stained, displaced from the domestic space they’re associated with and graphically imposing themself into this other White wall gallery space (itself chosen for its supposed neutrality). We talk about how things color a space, but also how things can queer a space––how things can turn a space not white, not normal.
Color is a crucial element to art, it’s part of its language. When I approach a print, I think about the impression of my etchings on white paper being this thing that emerges, this thing coming out of the white. All the playful associations that emerge from that sentence alone could send me on another tangent and I think that’s part of the fun.
Where do you reside between technical and intuitive in your work as an artist using color?
I don’t see myself as an intellectual. I get exactly what I need from a technique and move on. Just like when I was kid, I constantly see myself feeling my way through life. When I was in 6th grade and we were being taught color theory in my art class, we had to make samples of each theory. I was most drawn to warm/cool because it seemed easy but also more about feeling than any of the other theories, like how when we touch a surface we can feel its temperature.
Most of the time in my etchings, I am using some kind of warm black ink. I usually steer away from cool colors (I also really dislike cold weather). I think about the warmth we experience when we touch another body and the comfort it brings me. I want to be drawn in and seduced by an image. We describe things like people or homes as being “warm and inviting” and I want the same thing in my work. Bone black and burnt umber are my go-tos when I’m printing an etching: I want the thing to be represented simply but still have a temperature to it.
However, I’ve started thinking about other associations from my life. I did a series of watercolors called Pink Couch Fantasy based on images of couches from IKEA. My partner also has an intuitive approach to color but is much braver than I am. In one of our previous apartments, I let him paint our bedroom this color he found at the hardware store called, “Marry Me Pink.” We were struck by the name and it was a good compromise between us: muted for me, cute for him. Waking up every morning in that room was so peaceful and calm, like a little oasis, so I made a bunch of pink work in the studio that year.
“We describe things like people or homes as being “warm and inviting” and I want the same thing in my work. Bone black and burnt umber are my go-tos when I’m printing an etching: I want the thing to be represented simply but still have a temperature to it.”
Our Pillows (Tuesday, at 7:37 AM), 2019, etching on paper, 12" x 15"