paintings
Castañeda’s formal art education began in 1977 at San Alejandro Academy of
Fine Arts and was completed in 1982 at the Advance Institute of Fine Arts (ISA),
both in Havana, Cuba. While these institutions emphasized a classical art
education, post-revolutionary Cuba was cut off from western art centers, so her
knowledge of canonical masters was learned through reproductions, art history
and philosophy. Castañeda mastered the techniques of oil painting, and employs
these well-honed skills in conjunction with close readings of authors in translation—
such as Boris Groys, Walter Benjamin, and Nicolas Bourriaud—to explore
and interpret the circulation of images from different settings (popular culture,
cartoons, the church, folk tales, modern and contemporary art). She
constructs and organizes paintings as an exercise in codification, building
intertextual understandings of the dynamic interrelations between form, color,
and composition.
(From “A Map Of Four Decades” by Yasmeen Siddiqui to ” For Rent: Consuelo Castaneda” Exhibiton at Americas Society. 2011)
