Gerardo Castro Reembodies All That’s Truly Sacred
Ecstasy of St. Gerardo, 2014, diptych, oil on linen, mixed media, 18 x 24 inches. Courtesy of arist.
Gender. Colonialism. Santería. Artist Gerardo Castro listed these three elements as fundamental to his work at the opening of his exhibition Santo Gerardo at Ethan Cohen Gallery. A fourth element—racialization—is equally relevant since the artist ensures every text written about his work mentions his Afro-Caribbean heritage. Each of these topics is highly complex on its own, so it is not surprising that the confluence results in a baroque work, replete with symbolic elements following an aesthetic that you can sum up as a visual syncretism.
Although there are some three-dimensional elements in the show, Castro is primarily a painter, classically trained in the medium. Finding the practice limited his ideas, he turned to his pre-art school creative origins, to the memory of his mother putting together disparate items to create new decorations for their home. That is how Christmas lights, butterflies, and religious images coexisted in a vivid and colorful domestic space that reminded her of her natal Puerto Rico.
Still, all of Castro’s works derive from painting. Essentially tableaus, his works are collages on paper, or faux mosaics; sometimes a quatrefoil frame turns them into bas-reliefs; other times they appear projected to take the form of assemblage or installation. Whether or not the composition needs to invade the third dimension, all of Castro’s works are dramatic, eclectic scenes in which color reigns and the human figure is at the center. He presents each scene as a still from a nonlinear and unfinished history of his nation, Puerto Rico, in this way projecting the past through a prism, resulting in kaleidoscopic images. In this way, the artist reconfigures the times of a people, contextualizing it in its geographical space: the Caribbean, where it shares struggles with its brethren from other nations. Regardless of specific topics, his macro project is clear: breaking social stigmas over Black bodies, by re-sacralizing what Western culture has demonized.
“Regardless of specific topics, his macro project is clear: breaking social stigmas over Black bodies, by re-sacralizing what Western culture has demonized.”
Though gender, colonialism, Santería, and racialization play leading roles in Castro’s work, it is spirituality that brings them together and activates them with different purposes, including political criticism, homages to iconic figures, and commentaries on recent historical events. Santería is a religion of Cuban origin that emerged from the syncretism of spiritual practices from the African continent—mostly those of the Yoruba—and Catholicism. Based on a Caribbean religiosity, with a marked African influence in which there are gender-fluid deities, pastiche is Castro’s main artistic strategy. But here the word “pastiche” is not meant in a derogatory way; rather, it refers to how he uses imagery from multiple origins, recombining them to generate an original work. Even if Santería is an integral component of his work, Castro does not limit himself to the signs of this religion. A discerning eye will find symbols from Taíno spirituality, as well as vèvès from Haitian Vodou. The artist transcends the images of Christian saints that Santería appropriated to include popular Puerto Rican imagery, such as the vejigante mask, as well as common elements of ecclesiastical architecture, such as the quatrefoils. This is how syncretism constitutes the structural basis of Castro’s work.
It is impossible to speak of religious syncretism in the Caribbean without mentioning the repression that colonization entails. In Relación Acerca de las Antigüedades de los Indios, Fray Ramón Pané writes that a group of Taínos took the Christian images he gave them, buried them in a field, and urinated on them, saying that now they would bear great fruits. The priest took it as sacrilege, but he also commented that burying cemis—Taíno’s sacred images—in crops was part of their spirituality so that the god Yocahú would provide them with casaba. Likewise, enslaved people began to refer to their deities and spirits by the names of Christian saints to continue practicing their faith covertly. (In a letter from 1594—included in the 1916 Boletín Histórico de Puerto Rico by Calletano Coll y Toste—the Bishop of San Juan narrates how he “discovered” a group of enslaved people practicing their spirituality, which included the image of a goat; the colonizers whipped some of them and burned others to death.) Religious syncretism, then, has been a form of resistance against colonialism since the 15th century. To this day, many people demonize any religious activity or image with African origins, as part of what Anibal Quijano calls “coloniality.” Hence, with his images, Castro seeks to go beyond a mere aesthetic exercise, to constitute sacred imagery free from Christian supremacy, in a decolonial art practice.
Ironically, today we have a covert, but reconfigured colonialism, hiding behind false claims of progress and protection while still exploiting disadvantaged populations. In works such as Spirit of Resistance, Castro unveils this neocolonialism by creating parallels between the socio-political structure that used sugar cane as the economic engine of the Spanish empire and the canned sugar consumed today in soft drinks with the words “Old Colony” on the label.
Coronation of Santa Cacerola, 2020, oil on paper, mixed media, 24 x 72 inches. Courtesy of the artist
What colonizers once achieved through the imposition of Christianity, symbolized in that last artwork by the presence of Saint Martín de Porres (a Black Peruvian saint) over sugarcanes, now continues through mercantilism and the power multinational corporations have over U.S. politics and, by extension, the military-industrial complex. The result is still the same: the lack of political power in countries like Puerto Rico, and the exploitation of its population at the hands of men who do not have to deal with the political, economic and ecological impacts of it all. For this reason, Castro appropriates the attributes of the Virgin Mary and subverts them in Coronation of Santa Cacerola. Instead of presenting the woman as “the Lord’s slave,”¹ the artist crowns the woman who has fought for Borikén from precolonial times to the present day; the cacerola (saucepan) being a direct reference to the protests of Summer 2019 when, for the first time in history, Puerto Ricans forced a governor to resign. A cry for freedom—political, religious, sexual—is the backdrop of Castro’s oeuvre.
Castro works in series. Though some work might seem unrelated at first glance, the problems Castro addresses are too intertwined to divorce one series from the next. Racialization and heteronormativity in the Americas are the direct result of colonialism and coloniality; this is why, Castro reminds us that before European crowns dominated the great empires, there were equally powerful civilizations dominated by cultures from Asia and Africa. Employing a pictorial formula reminiscent of the Orientalist art of the 19th century, the artist alludes to the time when Arab powers—or nonwhite authorities—almost completely dominated the Iberian Peninsula as Al-Ándaluz.
Oshun's Reflection, 2012, diptych, oil on linen, mixed media, 38 x 42 inches. Courtesy of artist
In the series entitled Sublime Latino Masculinity, Castro references this period of Spanish history through nudes with veils and turbans in front of mosaics that seem directly copied from the Alhambra. However, these are not the typical exotic women, painted to satisfy European male fantasies. In paintings such as Illuminated Shadow and Oshun’s Reflection, the artist portrays burly Black men who confront the viewer by holding their penetrating gaze, challenging hegemonic notions of Western masculinity by wearing earrings and makeup. Emphasizing that art and art history have not been immune to colonialism, the artist subverts historically prevailing notions like the exoticization of the other, the objectification of women, and the male gaze.
In other paintings of the same series, such as St. Sebastian’s Sacred Heart and Ecstasy of St. Gerardo, the sitters show grimaces of pleasure and sensuality. Besides the obvious Christian references in the titles—which contrast with the homoerotic references—all these works are diptychs. On the opposite side of each naked man, a black silhouette repeats his pose unfolding a cosmos of spiritual signs, as if between these two figures a window to the invisible world burst open. Reconciling concepts that colonial Christianity considers contradictory, the artist naturally combines spirituality with sexuality, while upholding the beauty of Black bodies and avoiding fetishization through the confrontation of the sitters.
Smoke and Mirrors, 2019, oil paint, mixed media on paper, 24 x 72 inches. Courtesy of the artist
If Castro’s previous artworks allude to sexual orientation, Masculinity Reimagined is a much more direct series in its intention of challenging hegemonic masculinity. This set of explicit nudes stars drag queens and other gender-fluid people with penises. Big, muscular bodies with large genitalia express their gender identity through brightly colored hair, makeup, femme jewelry, and flowers everywhere. Perhaps the most confrontational aspect of this series is the fact that the artist dedicates specific pieces to conservative societies of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. In Flor & Florecita (Flower and Little Flower), the swimsuits of the two protagonists carry the flags of Puerto Rico and Cuba, countries with historical ties, separated by politics. Furthermore, these are two countries with highly conservative populations in which the LGBTQI+ community has suffered great persecution.
In the same vein, in Smoke and Mirrors, Castro questions those men who hide behind a sporty appearance to project a masculinity acceptable to society, while conferring the title of El Tiguere (a way in which Dominicans pronounce the word tiger, meaning the toughest or most courageous “manly” man) to the one who dares to openly wear makeup and painted fingernails. Here toughness and sweetness are no longer markers of males and females, but people’s choices of expression.
Castro’s work also gives a deserved place to those women who have exalted Afro-Caribbean culture. Thus, in his alternate sanctorale, the artist transfigures Marta Moreno Vega, Mayra Santos Febres, Celia Cruz, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Sylvia del Villar, among other important figures. But this gesture would falter without acknowledging the social struggles waged by women inside and outside Puerto Rico, so in addition to having embodied his people’s renewed spirit of protest in a woman with a saucepan in hand, Cruz also dramatizes macho violence against women in Our Lady of the Unloved Woman.
“Here toughness and sweetness are no longer markers of males and females, but people’s choices of expression.”
Domestic and state violence is a pressing issue that remains urgent and, in the case of Puerto Rico, has worsened with recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions. (Some politicians have proposed a sentence of 25 years of prison for women who get an abortion). For this reason, the artist looks outside the confines of North America for inspiration, portraying women leaders such as Nemonte Nenquimo and Marielle Franco. The effects of neocolonialism are not limited to a geographical space and, in the face of the ascension of extreme right-wing politicians, it is imperative to unite efforts among populations that have experienced first-hand systematic oppression. The subjects of Castro’s works have been woven together by history, so they emerge all at once in his paintings with the attention to detail of Lorenzo Homar, the palette and spiritual interests of Wifredo Lam, and the silhouettes of Belkis Ayón.
Beyond a melting pot, Puerto Ricanness is, and has always been, a heterogeneous culture, composed of elements that seem contradictory but that have coalesced over thousands of years, since the first waves of Arawak migration. Castro’s embraces this complexity in his Afro-Caribbean artistic practice, through which he canalizes the three initial concepts in the first line of this text, turning them into: polychrome, resistance, and homages.
¹ Luke 1:38
Carlos Ortiz Burgos is a Puerto Rican art historian and curator. He holds a BA from the University of Puerto Rico, an MA from Florida State University and is currently pursuing a PhD at the City University of New York. The focus of his historical research is the development of modern art in the insular Caribbean during the first half of the 20th Century and the revision of the official discourses and his curatorial projects tend to focus on the work of young artists.