The young Basque sculptor Naia del Castillo, who has strongly burst in the Spanish artistic world, is a good example of how the artistic renovation is never the result of the use of different materials or techniques, but of the creative yield. In this sense, until now, this artist has deal fluently with installations and manipulated photographs, revalidating the conceptual and material freedom that Dadaism revolutionised with and doesn’t stop extending, since Pop art till nowadays.
As happened with the mentioned before, for Naia del Castillo art can be made with anything, but never losing the reality, not for representing it, but to reply it, which signify the restoration of the narratives in the visual arts. Her narrative willing doesn’t make conditional to the relates gender, but to her direct critic testimony of her personal experience…
The evolution of her work is focused on the relation of woman to her physical and psychological environment. Concepts such as intimacy, seduction, home, domesticity, tradition and body are present in works that surpass the limits of photography and, to a certain point, redefine it. On the one hand, the dresses and many of the objects appearing in the photographs have been created, sewn, thought-up by the artist, to dress the models, to build their images; oftentimes these clothes and objects are exhibited together with the images. On the other hand, sculpture and that sense of arts and crafts traditionally viewed as characteristic of women, such as sewing, are at the origin of her dedication to art. In earlier series she amply developed themes such as the relation of woman to her everyday surroundings, to domesticity, to her mate and in a very subtle way, to sex and she later explored aspects of seduction and domination exercised in relationships.
Her work evolves in lines: formally it is increasingly condensed and Baroque; conceptually it has grown more sophisticated, ranging from more common, everyday aspects to others that are more subconscious and profound. If in her latest works she reflects in the desire to linked to that man, to bed, or to the home through clothing or household furnishing, in her latest works she reflects on the desire to possess, to the possession of beauty that refers us to wealth, though obliquely, and specially to sex. But woman, whether through her clothes, her decorative or ornamental elements, her make-up or her jewellery, is always at the core of an entire symbolic narration in which beauty, elegance and archetypical elements of seduction are ever present.
Del Castillo has gone from how woman is possessed by man and the domestic setting to a realm in which the woman is the one possessing through her weapons of seduction, and where envy and lust appear as obsessions with attaining the objects of desire immediately and totally, absolutely.
Her sometimes almost theatrical style has become denser, darker and more mottled over time, as she has left behind the simplicity and luminousness of her first works. Her images have become filled with mystery and they have gradually come to occupy the entire surface of the photographs.