and writes Yelp reviews—“Should I Yelp about our misfortune, my
lady?”
In a departure from his humorous illustrations, Castaño’s series Trans
Portraits are sumptuously rendered acrylic paintings of trans men
and women, posed elegantly against gently abstracted backgrounds,
invoking the history of portrait painting as idealization and depiction
of beauty, and valorization of subject. “I wanted to focus on trans
beauty in this series. You see a lot of paintings of cisgendered nude
women and men, and I wanted to make trans bodies and gender non-
conforming bodies to be beautiful and loved and not taboo.” These
paintings are elegant representations of the nuances and ambiguities of
physical features that are so frequently reduced to arbitrarily assigned,
binary-gendered associations—the dark hairs on an upper lip, a gently
sloping shoulder, an arched brow, a defi ned jawline, all of which we
have mistakenly chained to arbitrary categories “boy” or “girl.”
Everyone With the Head of Trump is the fi rst in a newly conceptual-
ized series of overtly political paintings by Castaño; continued explo-
rations of the medium which revitalize classical works from canonical
Western art history in a way that is relevant to our contemporary
world. In Everyone With the Head of Trump, Castaño references Car-
avaggio’s 1610 painting, David With the Head of Goliath, reimagined
with David as a triumphant, ambiguously gendered person, and Goli-
ath’s head a pucker-mouthed Trump, decapitated in a most satisfying
defeat. This painting is angry and hopeful, an emotional state that is so
diffi cult to maintain yet crucial during times of resistance. David was
small and he defeated a giant brute with a slingshot. The invocation of
This Fucking Guy, pen and ink on paper
Yelper, pen and ink on paper
of comics in the United States is intertwined with that of mass-print
media, and the ability to communicate with large numbers of people
effectively, as well as the need to do it with style. Political satire makes
many of the complexities and injustices of our world understandable
at an emotional level.
Stylistically infl uenced by the likes of R. Crumb and Daniel Clowes,
Castaño’s comics are explorations of his daily existence, life as a trans
man, pastiches of popular culture, and confessional self-portraiture,
executed with technical virtuosity and precision in pen and ink. Bat-
man, Walter White, and the Chik-Fil-A cow make cameo appearanc-
es throughout Castaño’s panels. Castaño’s stylization of an impish
self character, consistently clad in a horizontally striped t-shirt and
thick-rimmed glasses, is incredibly relatable in his millennial malaise,
self-conscious anxiety, and affection for pizza and Flamin’ Hot Chee-
tos.
In one multi-panel comic, a bloated version of Castaño’s self charac-
ter is managing an OkCupid profi le with overfl owing inbox from the
depths of a throne of thousands of day-old pizza slices, with two rats
in the foreground commenting on the scene, “this fucking guy…” A
television with a snowy screen sits precariously atop three pizza box-
es, silent witness to this quotidian moment. In Castaño’s comics, the
mundanities of millennial life are celebrated in humor and honest vul-
nerability. In one single panel illustration, a grotesquely melting head
adorned with a pustule is emblazoned with bubbly letters reading
“same stupid shit every day.” In another illustration, Castaño’s drool-
ing, intoxicated self character drunkenly stumbles home, followed by
an owl (or so he thinks.) In another humorous sequence, off-brand
vampire Nosferatu hides under the table at a restaurant during a date
37
www. ARTBORNEMAGAZINE.com