Mikel Escobales Castro

Installation artist Mikel Escobales Castro is interested in the presence and absence of shapes and forms within the gallery space. He is concerned with how, with the omission of its physical form, the idea and memory of an object can override and become more powerful than its visual spectacle. Escobales Castro describes how he coexists with his sculptures, that they act as a kind of conduit through which he can channel his own identity. To him, sculpture acts as the personification of an enigma, revealing nothing about itself other than its own ambiguity. Recently, the artist has worked with metal fabrics, neoprene and polyethene to produce forms that are draped throughout the gallery space, reminiscent of Eva Hesse’s ‘Contingent’ or certain faded silkscreens by Christian Boltanksi. Like in Hesse’s works, which are transitory by nature and constantly disintegrating, the pigment in Escobales Castro’s pieces does not maintain its initial texture, changing and evolving over time, eventually resolving to leave only the memory of its initial form.