Jacobo Castellano emerged on the Spanish art scene a decade ago with works that vividly retrace the memory of his early years in the southern region of his native Andalusia. Ever since, the distinctive environment in which Castellano spent his childhood has shaped a powerfully unnerving discourse that unfolds across sculpture, installation, photography, and collage. While not unaffected by international influences, such as that of the austere and metaphorically charged objects of Arte Povera, Castellano’s work always bears the weight of his own ambivalent cultural heritage: a gloomy worldview, shaped by the oppressive fear and guilt woven into the dominant religious attitude, which is closer to the morbid contemplation of death than to the joy of living. This sensibility had a profound impact on twentieth-century Spanish art—it can be found in Picasso’s early work, both in the crepuscular portraits and interiors of his Blue Period and in the brighter though melancholy scenes of circus characters and street life of his Rose Period. It can also be seen in the dark society depicted in José Gutiérrez Solana’s expressionist images and in a myriad of midcentury Spanish writing, and it echoes through Buñuel’s rebellious recapturing of the real. We ineluctably return to it every year in our macabre Easter rituals, and it prompted Castellano to create the ghastly atmospheres he cultivates today.

Childhood and toys have always played a key role in Castellano’s aesthetic universe. But instead of examining the nostalgia that such subjects might be expected to evoke, he uses them to explore our uneasy relationship with objects. A typical example was Casa, 2004, a huge, awkwardly built, old-fashioned wooden carousel stripped of its seats and ornamentation. Exhibited in Castellano’s first show at Galería Fúcares in 2005, it packed the main space, suggesting not a cheerful playtime but a disconcerting experience that probed deep into the realm of the uncanny. In the artist’s most recent exhibition, “Dos de pino” (Two of Pine), one of the strongest works was Malos tiempos (Bad Times), 2009. Here a cardboard horse, which has been ripped open and partially spread out on the floor, supports a tray, also cardboard, on which a glass of milk rests: a strange conflation of violent effort with anodyne normality. In this piece, Castellano hints at his fascination with the piñata, a common feature of kids’ parties in Spain. The memory of this toy also reverberates in Pelele 01 (The Straw Man 01), 2012, a photograph he recently found and reproduced, in which a stuffed doll is thrown up in the air, evoking the aerial figure of Goya’s El Pelele, 1771–72.

The body, in Castellano’s recent works, is an elusive presence, deeply connected to the domestic props and old pieces of furniture he has worked with in the past. The influence of those Surrealists and Dadaists who shared his morbid obsessions is clearer than ever, particularly in his strategy of deploying fragments so as to contradict their original meanings. In Bebedor 4 (Drinker 4), 2012, for example, the leg from a statue of Jesus Christ stands upside down on a wooden base, crowned by a metal cup. This weird and imbalanced arrangement dramatically transforms a devotional icon into the souvenir of an unhappy world in which things are left stranded in their latent solitude.

—Javier Hontoria