The practice of Jacobo Castellano is built upon a direct, physical, and exposed relationship with materials. His work unfolds primarily within sculpture and painting, understood as related fields in which matter is tested and pushed to its structural, formal, and symbolic limits.
In his works, materials such as wood, paper, clay, fabric, and rope are subjected to elementary physical actions—cutting, perforating, bending, stretching, supporting—from which form is constructed. These operations do not seek to conceal construction but to make it visible: the structure appears as it has been achieved, with its decisions, risks, failures, and repairs. The final form results from the balance and precision reached between intention and the resistance of matter, where process becomes a constitutive part of the work. What breaks or tears is not hidden but recomposed through staples, stitching, or applications of gold leaf, turning repair into a central formal and symbolic element and reinforcing the exposure of process as a condition of the piece.
Memory operates in his work on multiple levels: as personal memory linked to childhood and early encounters with objects; as memory of local traditions and manual knowledge; and as memory of art history, particularly the Baroque tradition, from which he draws formal intensity, the tension between balance and excess, and the affective dimension of matter. In this sense, his works do not aim to stabilize the past but to reactivate it from a contemporary position, where what is inherited becomes unstable and productive.
Far from an economy of scarcity, his interest lies in the expressive potential of materiality: in how materials, when forced or brought to limiting situations, generate forms that oscillate between the structural and the fragile, between the constructive and the imminent. This exposure to risk is not solemn but playful: his work engages with play, with childlike experimentation, and with the possibility of failure, collapse, or transformation.
Painting occupies a central place as a testing ground for these tensions. It does not function as an illusory surface but as an extension of sculptural logic: a space in which weight, support, accumulation, and balance are rehearsed, transferring to the pictorial plane a bodily relationship with matter.
Through this combination of formal rigor and openness to accident, Jacobo Castellano has developed a language of his own in which memory, material, and gesture articulate a poetics of courage: a practice that embraces risk as a productive condition and understands the artwork as a site where process remains visible, active, and vulnerable.
Born in Jaén in 1976 and based in Madrid, Jacobo Castellano graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Granada and has developed a sustained artistic career since the early 2000s. His work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions at leading institutions in Spain and abroad, including El espacio entre los dedos at Sala Alcalá 31 (Madrid, 2024–25), Las calles y los cuerpos at the Museo Patio Herreriano (Valladolid, 2022), and the retrospective project riflepistolacañón, which toured from the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Seville) to ARTIUM Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo (Vitoria-Gasteiz) between 2018 and 2019. He has also exhibited at the Centro José Guerrero (Granada) and in galleries in Porto.
Castellano was awarded the Cervezas Alhambra Prize for Emerging Art in 2017, and his work is included in major public collections such as ARTIUM (Vitoria-Gasteiz), CAAC (Seville), Museo CA2M (Móstoles), CGAC (Santiago de Compostela), and Fundación Botín (Santander), among others.