Marco Castillo: Parlor Games

“As an important part of my recent work, this exhibition speaks from the interior of the Cuban culture itself, and how its legacy and domain is decided by the state powers. This show rescues an aesthetic universe forgotten, dismissed by power in order to perpetuate itself and its ideals."

The multipart mahogany sculpture Familia Castillo Valdes (2022), from Castillo’s latest series Juego de sala, offers a glimpse into personal spaces touched by the revolution. This wall-hung work recalls at once the interior of a home as viewed from above, and the Sputnik-inspired aesthetic in vogue during the Atomic Age of the 1950s. Juego de sala translates into English as “living room set,” but Juego can also mean “game.” This ambivalence is the inspiration for the exhibition’s title, Parlor Games, which suggests both a middle class family in playful repose and a political system rife with obfuscation.

Parlor Games includes a series of works bearing the name of  important Cuban creatives — architects, designers, and intellectuals such as Gonzalo Córdoba, Ana Vega, Félix Beltrán, and Clara Porset, whose artistic and personal narratives were interrupted by politics. Once championed by the state to design a new, modern Cuba, their works were later denounced and stigmatized for promoting ideals that were later considered dangerous by those in power.

Reflecting this period of utopian aesthetics and social tumult, Castillo’s sculptures merge elements of Modernist and Soviet-era design with materials and techniques traditional to Cuba, such as mahogany wood and rattan caning, while the works on paper feature trompe l’oeil renderings of these same forms and materials in watercolor.