Reign of Blood: Vincent Castile uses his own blood to give life to his subjects
In January, at the annual National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show in Anaheim, California, Slayer guitarist Gary Holt unveiled a guitar decorated with 18 bottles of his own blood. He commissioned Vincent Castiglia, a 34-year-old New York artist, to paint the guitar, and in keeping with the mischievous and playful exhibitionism of the entire project, the artist drew blood from Holt backstage after a concert in Long Island that he ultimately used for the artwork. The unveiling of NAMM generated significant media attention. With publications ranging from metal music outlets and online horror enclaves to VICE’s Noisey channel covering the event, it’s a spectacle that lends itself well to media attention. It’s a crazy, scary, fun stunt with an irresistible central conceit: The metal god painted the guitar with his own blood.
Of course, the artist himself, Castile, was thrust into the spotlight. What struck me about this project and its denouement at NAMM was the almost inevitable neglect of the artwork itself in the dizzying amount of media coverage. Castile’s Blood Painting on Holt’s guitar is a dark and poignant meditation on the iconic fallen angel Lucifer. In Castile’s writing, Satan is portrayed as a brooding, almost penitent figure, whose ambivalence adds to his biblical mystique. But amid the deafening cacophony of other factors—slayers, custom guitars, the sheer madness of metalheads—it can be hard to appreciate the art itself. Castilla says the custom guitar, which some have called “the most metal thing ever,” is in a way emblematic of Castilla’s entire career: the tension between the perception of an exhibitionist and the reality of a serious artist who happens to use his own blood.
Castile began experimenting with painting with blood in 2000. He was eighteen years old at the time. By 2003, he was using it exclusively.
Although there have been a number of copycat artists who also use blood since Castile began to gain traction in the late 2000s, it’s doubtful anyone can speak with the same unwavering conviction. He said the motivation behind the technology 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 time,” he said. “I liken it to bleeding. When the pressure goes beyond a certain point, the blood vessel ruptures.” The analogy may sound scary, but Castile clarified that ruptures always have “the intent to communicate.” In other words, this medium may have been born from a place of mental anguish, but it is not content to wallow in despair; the act itself is a transformative gesture. To hear him tell it, human plasma is more than just a gratuitous horror movie prop. “Everything about us is in our blood.
Whether you believe it contains spiritual energy or not, whether you believe it contains more than that, that’s interesting to me. “
Everything about us is contained in our blood. Whether you believe it contains spiritual energy or not, whether you believe it contains more than that, that’s interesting to me. “
Castile first began showing his work in group exhibitions in the mid-2000s. In many ways, his style and major themes are fully formed, as if they had been brewing within him for years. As an artist, he doesn’t seem to need to grow or evolve, but just clear everything away. One of his first major paintings, “Feeding,” is a disarming summary of a theme that would continue to fuel Castile’s work for the next decade.
Archetypes, weakness, disfigurement, regenerative cycles of life and death—it’s all there. This “feeding” inevitably elicits complex responses from the viewer, full of detours and re-examinations that are crucial to unpacking Castile’s work. At first morbid and distressing, the woman in a wheelchair nursing her newborn baby in declining condition eventually reappears with a closer relationship to transcendence and perseverance. Young mothers with babies succumb to disease and pain every day.
Castile’s subject is not so much an impossible monster as she is an archetypal figure: the mother who gave life and who now must come to terms with the impending death. He simply depicted this irresistible universal truth in a metaphysical, anatomical, graphic way. “Feeding” is a story about life and death, and how they often coexist, becoming so closely integrated that we can rarely celebrate the former while mourning the latter. “Her legs have disintegrated, but she is still trying to raise her children despite the unspoken illness inherent in her existence,” he said. Far from the terrifying phantoms that drift from some remote corner of the tormented dream, this is a chapter in the story of primitive man.
