José Luis Castillo (Venezuela, 1973), is a painter graduated from the Instituto Universitario de Estudios Superiores de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón, in Caracas, who has developed a work with a clear preference for landscape. In his work, two tendencies are distinguished in the way of approaching this genre, one contemporary and the other traditional. But in both cases his images come from the national landscape, from geographical and cultural icons of Venezuela such as the Ávila mountain, located in Caracas, or the Gran Sabana, located in the south of the country, in the Guayana, to mention the best known.

Within the contemporary line, he has the series called Grafía del paisaje in which he captures the essence of the landscape. But as of 2010, he started the Ávilas series, which we now show in Arte Original.

For Castillo, landscaping is a legacy of the Escuela de Caracas, active in the first half of the 20th century, and of two of its most prominent representatives, Pedro Ángel González and Manuel Cabré. For the artist, they made a fundamental contribution in the treatment of light, of the brushstroke, in the way of applying the warm and cold colors that are “being lost”. He comments “I want to take something back from them, I want to keep some of that.”

With these references, the purpose of Castillo is to modernize the image of Ávila, through painting: “landscape painting has a deeply rooted aesthetic, it has not evolved much. I want to keep that but giving it a contemporary vision”. He defines himself as a formalist, the content goes in the second place. Hence, Antoni Tapies is one of the artists from whom he refers: “If I paint a landscape that transmits peace, it is because the landscape goes to the formal, to the phenomenal.”

José Luis Castillo has had an outstanding career at the national level, being worthy of recognition in art salons and biennials.

Anny Bello