About Elmer Castillo

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Born in Guantánamo, Cuba, in 1970. His first solo exhibition, Estampas desde mi Aldea at La Celosía, opened in Guantánamo in 1998. During those early years, his interests extended beyond painting into design and curatorial work, experiences that would later shape the research-based character of his artistic practice.

In 2002, Castillo moved to Madrid, beginning a personal journey that would later take him to the United States. He settled in the U.S. in 2011 and has lived and worked in Miami since 2016. Migration gradually became more than a biographical circumstance in his work. It became a way of thinking about memory, identity, territory and the objects people carry with them -or leave behind- when they move from one place to another.

His ongoing project The Spiral Cannot Expand began with an observation of the Polymita picta, an endangered land snail native to eastern Cuba. The extraordinary colors and geometry of its shell led Castillo to the spiral as both a visual structure and a metaphor.  A form associated with growth that, in his work, becomes contained and unable to expand. What began as an investigation of nature gradually opened into questions about human experience, migration and the forces that shape or interrupt transformation.

This evolution has also changed the material language of his work. Alongside painting and resin, Castillo incorporates soil, roots, plant fibers, wood, jute, textiles, glass and reclaimed objects. Some materials are preserved or suspended within resin, creating surfaces that operate almost as archaeological records. The contrast between intensely colored works and more austere, earth-toned pieces reflects different moments of the same investigation rather than separate bodies of work.

In 2026, Castillo presented The Spiral Cannot Expand at Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello in Venice during the 61st Venice Biennale. The presentation brought together visual work, performance and publications. Following the exhibition, both the printed edition of The Spiral Cannot Expand and an artist book created for the project were incorporated into the ASAC Library of La Biennale di Venezia.

His recent research has developed into Memoria Strata, a body of work centered on migration, memory and material traces. Here, portraits, documents, objects and organic matter accumulate as layers of individual experience, approaching the human body as a territory shaped by experiences.

Castillo’s practice continues to move between the research, painting, sculpture, installation and publication, and between two recurring tensions that are expansion and containment, color and earth, presence and absence, preservation and deterioration. In 2027, he will participate in the XVI Florence Biennale, Beyond the Sense of Time, at Fortezza da Basso in Florence.