There are moments that generate a drastic change, a mark that remains constant in our memories. Like the scratch of a blue droplet sliding on a yellow triangle.
Photography becomes that crack through which to spy on moments of a life, capture and capture images that travel to the future in drawings; and thus remain, understand and dialogue about the world around us. Trying to find and transform everyday memories from day to day, from the environment and the environment that we cohabit as roommates and travel companions. We get older, we also grow.

Idaira del Castillo, 2023

Precociously finding her voice in painting; without finishing Fine Arts, she wins the Award of Artes Plásticas Manolo Millares (2017) and with less than 30 years of age already exhibits individually in Madrid and in the main Centers of Art of Canarias (La Regenta, Cabrera Pinto, Juan Ismael… and in CAAM in 2024). Since then, we can already see the caracteristics of her poetic: her formidable mastery of drawing, great formats, brilliant colors. Powerful and scenographic, she explores both fauvism and the expressionism like those of Pop Art, manga, comic and graffiti.

At first glance, the strong presence that her works impose, their chromatic richness, the self-confidence, the luminosity, the histrionic colors and the soft support: fabrics and felt stand out. The materials, the stitching and the magnitudes refer to her childhood, so the artist lives in a world between seams. The family made Canarian costumes. And, as an adult, the frameless fabrics, the collage technique, the textures and a scenographic sensibility outline her poetic feminist echo: the vast majority of her portraits are of women and almost all the materials she uses are recycled: fabrics, canned cardboard, plastics… In addition, Idaira has great empathy with animals, which also lurk in a painting with different textures: such as animal skin and the collages.
It is a very physical artwork, it does not revolve around history of art or of culture, rather, of her own life: identity, offcuts, memory, creativity, determination… The fabrics, painted directly without previously priming, pour over walls and floors. Idaira uses her fabrics like color or texture and has evolved towards painting: “I like that the works seem traced, as if they were copies of gum stickers. I play with the stroke to arrive at the minimum expression. I’m learn-ing to draw with emptiness and to hide both beginning and end of a drawing with only one stroke”.

The materials bring their own history. Idaira paints them, manipulates them, tramples on the fabrics, reinforces them so that they hold up, she adds more or less seams: “it’s something that the personality of the fabric asks of you.” The images with a flat perspective and broken drawing usually comes from photographs, which she reinterprets with an imaginative and critical vision: “the individual, everyday monsters, the decay of the subject, the unstructured personality, deformity as a personality trait, the psychology of relationships, the inner animal, the assimilation of memories.” Her paintings are always intense and expressionistic, she is not fascinated by the new, but does reflect the immediacy, the impatience, the rapture of the current world, and the paradox of being increasingly more connected and more alone.

Color as an attraction, striking, bright, futuristic, of an Asian megalopolis, emotional, “is very important to represent the moods of each character and discover the worlds they inhabit.” The light is Atlantic, African, southern, warm. The setting, geek; distorted perspective and scale. Idaira does not consider references, her paintings are very ‘carpe diem’, but also a palimpsest of Egyptian art, of Matisse, Warhol, Basquiat, of graffiti, manga… Fernando Álamo, who shares her interest in collage and scenography, enlightens me : “she uses the colored pencil like a huge brush, her multicolored fabrics are reminiscent of the frescoes of Giotto and Botticelli, her paintings are a photographic album” and her drawings are the umbilical cord that connects her to life.

Carlos Díaz-Bertrana