Last week saw the opening of Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo‘s exhibition Mad Soldiers at Push Gallery. Standing in the corridor outside the gallery, Castillo’s artworks look like jubilant, vivid drawings of people, flowers, and animals. This all changes as you enter the gallery and get closer to the works. Beautifully rendered in pure, jewel-like hues are some of the most violent and gruesome scenes imaginable: soldiers with their limbs cut off, their wounds glowing in luscious pink, a flowery meadow strewn with dolls’ heads, blood and guts, entrails, genitalia used as weapons. All carefully outlined, detailed, and shaded in pencil.

The tension between the cheery colours of these works and their gruesome subject matter is at once disturbing and hypnotic. Like a modern-day Hieronymus Bosch, Castillo creates a tapestry of horror which communicates on a visceral level the injustices of war, especially the use of child soldiers. The crayon colours, the dolls and the toys belie the cruelty these children are forced to endure and inflict. Castillo make his point elegantly and aptly, subverting beauty to show us the terrors of war.

Galerie Push, space 425
Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo
Mad Soldiers
March 24 – April 23, 2011
www.galeriepush.com