Reign in Blood: Vincent Castiglia Brings His Subjects to Life With His own Blood
This past January, at the annual National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show in Anaheim, California, Slayer guitarist Gary Holt unveiled a guitar adorned with eighteen vials of his own blood. He’d commissioned thirty-four-year-old New York City-based artist Vincent Castiglia to paint the guitar, and in keeping with the badassery and playful exhibitionism of the whole project, the artist drew the blood he ultimately used for the artwork from Holt backstage after a concert on Long Island. The reveal at NAMM garnered significant attention from the press. Covered by publications ranging from metal music outlets and online horror enclaves to VICE’s Noisey channel, it was the sort of spectacle exceptionally well suited to media attention. A crazy, ghoulishly amusing stunt with an irresistible central conceit: Metal God Has Guitar Painted in His Own Blood.
Naturally, the artist himself, Castiglia, was also thrust into the spotlight. What struck me about this project and its denouement at NAMM was how the dizzying reams of press coverage were, almost inevitably, overlooking the artwork itself. Castiglia’s blood painting on Holt’s guitar is a darkly poignant meditation on that iconic fallen angel, Lucifer. In Castiglia’s hands Satan is depicted as a brooding, almost repentant figure, the heft of his ambivalence adding to his biblical mystique. But amid the deafening clamor of other factors—Slayer, custom guitars, the sheer insanity of metal fandom—it was probably difficult to appreciate the artistry itself. The custom guitar, which Castiglia says that some have referred to as “the most metal thing ever,” is in some ways emblematic of Castiglia’s career as a whole: the tension between the perception of exhibitionism and the reality of a serious artist who just happens to use his own blood.
Castiglia started experimenting with painting in blood in 2000. He was eighteen. By 2003, he was using it exclusively.
While a handful of copycat artists also using blood have bubbled up since Castiglia first started garnering serious attention in the late 2000s, it’s doubtful that any can speak with the same hardcore bone fides. He says that the motivation behind the technique came from a desire to connect with his work on a more intimate level.
When he first started painting with his own blood, “it was a particularly intense period of time,” he says. “I liken it to a hemorrhage. When the pressure builds past a certain point, and the vessel ruptures.” The analogy may sound grisly, but Castiglia clarifies that the ruptures always have an “intent to communicate.” In other words, the medium may have been born out of a place of psychic pain, but it’s not content to wallow in despair; the act itself is a gesture toward transformation. And to hear him tell it, human plasma is much more than just a gratuitous horror movie prop. “Everything we are is contained in the blood.
Whether you believe that it contains psychic energy, whether you believe it contains more than that, it’s interesting to me.”
Everything we are is contained in the blood. Whether you believe that it contains psychic energy, whether you believe it contains more than that, it’s interesting to me.”
Castiglia first started showing his work at group exhibitions in the mid-2000s. In many ways his style and predominant motifs arrived fully formed, as if they had been stewing inside him for years. It seemed he didn’t need to grow or evolve as an artist so much as he simply had to purge everything out. One of his first major paintings, “Feeding,” is a disarming encapsulation of the subject matter that would go on to fuel Castiglia’s work for the next decade.
Archetypes, infirmity, disfigurement, the regenerative cycle of life and death—it’s all there. That “Feeding” inevitably elicits a complicated response from the viewer, full of switchbacks and reexaminations, gets at something vitally important to unlocking Castiglia’s work. Morbid and distressing at first, the deteriorating woman in the wheelchair, breastfeeding her newborn baby, eventually reemerges as something more closely aligned with transcendence and perseverance. Young mothers with infant children succumb to disease and affliction every day.
Castiglia’s subject is not so much an unlikely monstrosity as she is an archetypal figure: the mother who, having given life, must now accept the imminence of death. He is simply, in his metaphysical, anatomically graphic way, depicting this inexorable universal truth. “Feeding” is a story about life and death and how often they coexist, knit so closely together that we rarely get to celebrate the former without mourning the latter. “She’s got disintegration in her legs, yet she’s struggling to nurture her young, in spite of the self-evident maladies that are innately threaded into her existence,” he says. Far from a macabre phantasmagoria wafting up from some remote corner of a tortured dreamscape, this is a chapter in the primal human story.
Castiglia’s paintings strike a difficult balance between universality, the “anima mundi,” as he puts it, and personal experiences in his life. “They are what I believe to be stations of human experience that are universal, so in the work is contained love and loss and death and birth and disintegration and growth and betrayal and lust,” he says.
Early pieces like “Stings of the Lash” and “Multiply Thy Sorrow” depict subjects, suspended somewhere between individual and allegory, in varying states of disfigurement, fixed in a kind of holy tableau. Men (and women) take on Christ-like attributes, but elude easy symbolism.
The woman in “Multiply Thy Sorrow” may be assuming the pose of Christ on the crucifix, but she also recalls Jesus’s mother, Mary, “Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows.”
The religious referents are often obscure or overlapping, but Castiglia’s affinity for the formative Christian story is never in dispute. “I really identified with the story, with the suffering. The crucifixion, particularly. Because it’s quite a morbid and brutal story. I guess that is what most impressed me. There was a lot of identification with the brutality there, and also the transcendence.” It’s a novel vantage point into a story that is easily taken for granted because of its relentless ubiquity in Western society. Christ’s last days are laced with extreme suffering, first through betrayal, then imprisonment, flagellation, and humiliation, and finally in the crucifixion itself, the most significant event in perhaps the most significant life in human history. Castiglia processes the Christ narrative on a more visceral level than most, understanding the barbarous physical realities behind events now mostly preserved behind reverential glass. Much of Castiglia’s work, especially his earlier, breakthrough pieces when he was just beginning to attract notoriety for painting in his blood, function as capsule passion plays: Subjects offer up their flesh in secularized martyrdom, a last-minute bid for transcendence amid a monochromatic world rapidly degenerating around them.
She’s got disintegration in her legs, yet she’s struggling to nurture her young, in spite of the self-evident maladies.”
When I asked Castiglia about the role of disfigurement in his paintings, he shared an anecdote about himself and H.R. Giger, the legendary Swiss painter with whom Castiglia was close. Years ago Castiglia was in Switzerland with Giger and his wife, driving to the artist’s eponymous museum in the historical town of Gruyères. While driving, Giger was glancing over at Castiglia’s portfolio in his wife Carmen’s lap. When he came upon “Feeding,” he asked Castiglia, who was in the backseat, if he had ever been in an accident, if his legs had ever been injured. It was a revelatory moment for the young artist. “It never occurred to me until that moment,” Castiglia says. “I was hit by a car when I was eight. It was a really bad situation.” He suffered compound fractures in his left leg, was bleeding internally, and was running a fever. They couldn’t operate at first, and an infection eventually set in, becoming gangrenous. At one point they decided that they would have to amputate his leg the following morning. At the last minute, a doctor from another hospital volunteered to operate in order to save the leg, and the procedure was successful. But the memory of that trauma never fully faded. “That was a kind of major trauma that really unconsciously worked itself out in the work.” It feels appropriate for an artist whose paintings come from recesses of tortured intimacy that those who’ve studied Castiglia’s work are able to tease out these autobiographical elements. It is hard to imagine that the person behind works like “Conqueror,” “Beautiful Vivisection,” and the more recent “Autopsy of the Soul” would not be familiar with what Castiglia refers to as “violence to the flesh.”
Castiglia’s friendship with Giger, who passed away in 2014 [Editor’s note: See our article in Hi-Fructose Volume 23 for a retrospective on Giger], was both a personal and professional boon. Castiglia took part in a group show in 2006 at the H.R. Giger Museum, which is housed in the historic Chateau St. Germain Castle in Gruyères, and it was there that Giger saw the artist’s work in person for the first time. Impressed by the two pieces Castiglia showed at the group exhibition, Giger invited him to put together a solo exhibition at his museum. The invitation would come to fruition with Remedy for the Living in 2008-2009, the first-ever solo exhibition by an American artist at Giger’s museum. Remedy for the Living witnessed Castiglia’s aesthetic expand beyond the wraithlike amputees shrouded in saintly affliction that marked his earlier period. Here he established a greater diversity in both atmosphere and countenance—figurative pieces are often more sinister, with subjects brooding and vamping on thrones and alongside serpents; and allegorical pieces were richer and more ambitious, with Castiglia’s blood achieving a golden hue as he found new ways to capture paradoxes of the life cycle and existential enigmas.
With its imperious demons and wicked hags, human pincushions and haunted femme fatales, it’s easy to frame this period of Castiglia’s career as the snapshots of a macabre underworld, the kind of darkly splendorous place where memories fade into black voids, bodies twist and writhe like grass, and a few pomegranate seeds spell a lifetime of bondage. But it is a testament to Castiglia’s complexity as an artist that we must check ourselves before such sweeping assumptions; this is work the artist himself is always quick to assure is born out of his own life.
It was a particularly intense period of time,” he says. “I liken it to a hemorrhage. When the pressure builds past a certain point, and the vessel ruptures.”
It’s the blood that allows personal episodes to transform into something stranger and more articulate of a nearly fully coherent, overarching world, one populated by the specters and ghouls of the painter’s bright, tattered psychological tapestry.
Castiglia’s most recent series, Autopsy of the Soul, suggests a sharp turn in a new direction. Instead of straddling distinct gothic characters with broader symbolism, Autopsy of the Soul leaps deep into allegorical territory:
Figures are less individuals than personifications of human follies and lost virtues. Taken together, the paintings represent a philosophical argument about the current state of human society—an imploration to remember the invisible moral universe people often seem all too eager to forget.
Castiglia said of Giger that he was “depicting things that are so ethereal and so amorphous and giving them such concrete form with such detail and subtly that it was almost frightening but almost comforting… someone else had descended into these realms to bring this back and testify to it.” What with his recurring Christ motif, careful, sacramental approach to each work, and through-a-glassdarkly glimpse into a world that closely mirrors our own, it’s not a bad way of looking at Castiglia’s oeuvre, either.
The blood and flair for corporeal ruin may be the first things one takes away from his paintings. But eventually, the line of hope and triumph streaks across the lugubrious phantoms: In their struggle to understand and reconcile themselves to mortality, his pieces seem to suggest that you overcome death by accepting it. Frightening, but also comforting.*
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