by Seth Combs

 

The Colombia-born San Diego artist, musician and college professor tackles subjects from colonialism to Indigenous culture in his work

 

Carlos Castro Arias’ artistic practice began with a forgery.

When asking a respected painter when they first knew they had an artistic spirit, one expects a certain kind of answer. Perhaps that answer will be an anecdote about a class they took in elementary school. Maybe it was a family trip to a museum. Sometimes the answer is as simple as them discovering their first medium, even if that happened to be crayons and a coloring book.

For Arias, however, his answer to the question above is just as original and multifaceted as the work he produces.

“I once showed my mother an exam from school that I failed, and she was very mad,” Arias recalled, from his childhood years in Bogotá, Colombia. “I also got a bad grade the next week and I knew she was going to get mad at me again.”

Arias goes on to explain that the school needed a parent’s signature, confirming they were aware of his poor scores, so he ended up forging his father’s signature. When the teacher realized his deception, the school called his home.

 

“My mother was telling my father to tell me that I did something bad,” Arias continues. “She wanted him to get mad at me, and he just looked at me and said, ‘You know, Carlos, you’re an artist.’”

As our conversation remains on the subject of his formative years in Bogotá, it’s easy to notice the vast collections of toys and figurines peppered amongst the paintings in his La Mesa home and studio.

Arias explains that when he was a child, the government of Columbia put a ban on all non-essential imports. This meant that Arias would often have to create his own toys out of found materials such as wire, tape and discarded plastics. So using his skills to create artful playthings wasn’t so much the result of vivid, artistic imagination, but something he did out of necessity.

“I love that, when you don’t really know what an artist is trying to tell you or where it’s coming from. That they just created it to create it. You feel something in your stomach. That’s what I want to create. Something that creates a visceral response,” Arias explains.

“That’s what I tell my students, you know you’re on a good track with a project when you feel something in your stomach,” he continues, referencing his day job as an art professor at San Diego State University. “Don’t question that. Feel the thing inside and explore it.”

This logic, this need to create something fantastical and instinctive, has extended into his present-day practice. He has worked as an artist for more than two decades, and since moving to the San Diego/Tijuana region in 2019 (with months-long sojourns back to Colombia every now and again), he’s expanded his artistic practice in ways that are both impressive and seemingly bizarre.

“I say that I’m a painter, but I actually do sculpture, installation, and music — everything. I’ve even done things with human fat,” Arias says, referencing a series of paintings where he used human fat as a varnish.

While using human fat as a material or sculpting a piece that incorporates human teeth, crack pipes or even confiscated knives, might seem aberrant to some, it speaks more to Arias’ desire to never limit himself to what sort of art he produces. What’s more, his work, however blatant it might seem on the surface, speaks to myriad issues of the human condition.

“Think of an artist like Andy Warhol,” Arias says. “He would make paintings, sculpture, videos, and he would also have his own magazine and modeling agency. That’s what I tell my students all the time: be creative all the time, because being an artist is not easy.”
The unlimited depths of his imagination will be on display at “The Splinter in the Eye,” a solo exhibition of new works set to open at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library on October 19.

Arias is producing 11 new paintings-on-wood for the show, but will also be incorporating other elements throughout the gallery, both natural and otherwise. For example, he plans on using natural and artificial light to make some of the paintings “glow” while others will incorporate live plants in response to the plants within the painting. There’s even one that will include a vaporizer so that the viewer will be able to “see the vapor inside the painting.”

“It’s a little all over the place,” Arias admits, laughing.

He also plans to have a fountain feature that will be a bust of Junípero Serra, the canonized Spanish priest and Franciscan missionary who is closely associated with the San Diego region. There will also be taxidermied creatures borrowed from the San Diego Natural History Museum. He’s even thinking about incorporating sonic elements, or what he calls “musical happenings,” where people would create a cacophony of melodies as they walk through the show.

It’s easy to see that the paintings themselves are only part of the picture. Take, for example, this scenario: There will be a painting of a bird painting in the exhibition. Within that painting, the painting within the painting will be mounted on a wooden structure that’s surrounded by other materials. Then that painting will be mounted on a similar wooden structure within the Athenaeum and surrounded by other materials. Confused? Good, that’s certainly one of the results Arias is looking for.

“With my past work, the view and meanings could sometimes be very narrow,” Arias says. “And this show is more intricate. You could say that it’s about the wood or something, but I think the viewer will really know specifically what it’s about.”

The result is something like surrealism, but not so much stylistically. By  incorporating and mixing all these varying elements, the art feels multilayered, almost meta and dreamlike. There is a controlled chaos of the mind.

The viewer may think they’re picking up on themes of the natural world or humanity’s struggle with the history of colonialism, but by incorporating other elements and materials, it upends these initial observations. This gives the art a conversational depth. The viewer may leave confused or bewildered, but Arias says that’s good. The intent is to make them think.

In many ways, Arias sees “The Splinter in the Eye” as an extension and evolution from his past shows.

He references “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (2024) and “Accidental Beauty” (2013), both of which were shown in Bogotá. The former was staged at the Museo de Arte Moderno and saw him  incorporating a statue of Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella I (the Spanish monarch who famously financed Columbus’ journey to the Americas) that had been torn down in Bogotá.

“Those statues were going to be vandalized and destroyed by the people, maybe even lynched,” Arias says. “It’s easy to look at these things and think ‘(expletive) Columbus and colonization,’ but what about using it for education? You see the statue and you see the art around it, and when there’s not a direct meaning, you can see it as a challenge.”

This combination of boldness and originality landed Arias the San Diego Art Prize in 2022.

He has swiftly joined a community of local artists such as Hugo Crosthwaite, Marcos Ramírez ERRE and the De la Torre Brothers who are creating work that speaks to issues important to the Mexico/U.S. border region. But it is highly unfair to think that what he’s creating is “border art.”

“Living here has been inspiring because every time I go to Tijuana, I get inspired, but I agree that it’s kind of problematic, maybe a little like I was trying to get attention if I was only doing art about the border,” Arias explains. “They start targeting you as an ‘artist of the border,’ and it’s also an issue with labeling something as  ‘Latinx art’ or ‘Black art.’ It puts you in a box.”

Yes, some of his work might seem highly conceptual on the surface, addressing issues of colonialism and indigenousness in very direct ways. But Arias is quick to point out that just as the materials he might use for his art are unlimited, so too is his way of thinking about what that art means.

“You try a bunch of things and that’s what makes you an artist,” says Arias, who has also been a lifelong musician, most recently playing in Amor Negro, a musical project he started with his brother. “The idea of just being one kind of painter, one kind of artist doing one kind of thing, that’s something I have issues with.”

‘Carlos Castro Arias: The Splinter in the Eye’
When: Opening reception, 6:30-8:30 p.m. Oct. 18. Exhibit runs 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, Oct. 19 through Jan. 11
Where: Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, 1008 Wall St., La Jolla
Admission: Free