Thursday 11 June 2015

Santiago Caruso


Santiago Caruso

Exploring the weird art of Santiago Caruso

 The following text is an interview with Argentine artist and illustrator Santiago Caruso conducted by David Davis for 'Wierd Fiction Review'

Santiago Caruso

DAVID DAVIS
While you may not recognize his name, chances are that if you’ve read weird fiction, you’ve seen his artwork. Argentine visual artist Santiago Caruso fuses a unique combination of everything from surrealism to the fantastique into his art.


He’s created countless covers for weird fiction books for everything from Tartarus Press to the recently released Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One

We talked to Caruso about what inspires his art, how he makes it, and more.

DAVIS
 Your art is very distinct and easy to identify. It’s an interesting combination that ranges from Gothic to surreal to fantastical. How do you tend to describe your style?


CARUSO
 Today, I would define myself as a Symbolist, who recreates the deformation of reality that the human being perceives — i.e. the phantom of conventional objects — to go deeper into them with a new kind of perception. 


I try to summon a poetic phantom that supplies a wider vision of the human, contemplating the beautiful, the frightening, the repressed or forgotten in the shadows, the impossible.

With this concept of depiction, I try to utilize Gothic symbolism as a crystallized view of the world in many respects.


I combine religion, politics, and commonplace things to reveal another vision of the world with regard to the unconscious, the damned ghosts we’ve buried, and many other aspects of history and philosophy.


DAVIS
 How did you become an artist? What artists or artworks have influenced your work?

CARUSO
 From a very early age, I remember building houses, ships, and other stuff with boxes or chairs and playing in them with toys; inventing stories is something I’ve always done since then.

Drawings and music were also present since the first days of my childhood. I copied comic strips such as PatoruzúCondorito and Afanancio. I also made caricatures of people and by chance, I attended classes with a teacher who did comics when I was 14 years old.

Music was always there, in addition, influencing my artwork.

Max Klinger

Later, at 19, I made illustration my medium of expression. I started making children’s illustrations in books for school. Later, under the influence of William Blake and other Symbolists, such as Max Klinger, Alfred Kubin, and Odilon Redon, my style underwent a change in order to be the same tone of the themes I saw in their images.

Alfred Kubin

The questions of evil, sin, love, memory and beauty, are subjects that were inspiring to me, so the narrative path I took to illustrate weird fiction turned later from the anecdotal allegory into poetry in order to build a narrative and not just a moment in the story.



 I do oscillate between those languages, depending on the text and how I want to express the content. These days, I am writing and I believe those scripts can be songs. I don’t know, but maybe I will do something with music too.

DAVIS 
You've done art for a number of weird fiction books like The King in the Golden Mask and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. Do you read weird fiction?

CARUSO
  Yes, I do. My artwork is closely related with fantastic literature of the XIX century and philosophy. I am between Romanticism and psychology, poetry and skepticism.


I am related to the word, or I should say, to language. I believe I construct my images as if I were writing them. The final view of it must communicate in one glance the general feeling and idea, but after that, you can read the image almost as a text, so it must be built with the same rules of grammar if you want to express yourself clearly.

DAVIS
  Are there authors or poets have inspired you? Are there any particular books, literature, poems that have inspired your works?

CARUSO
  One of the special moments of change in my life was when I read the writings of William Blake and Charles Baudelaire. The latter is almost like a father to my style. I could say I am always returning to him as a prodigal son. 

I’ve also started reading Poe, Lovecraft, Meyrink, and many others but the particular view of Marcel Schwob is the perfect mirror I’ve found for my visual narrative. 


The French Decadent movement is the weird literature I love the most, specifically À rebours (Against Nature) by J. K. Huysmans.

As a project next year, I have the hard task of undertaking Les chants de Maldoror, but I will enjoy the challenge. The strange tone and eclectic mood of the writings of Pascal Quignard is another thing I find inspiring. 

Pascal Quignard


I try to express this in the change from narrative to visual poetry I do these days. However, the tone of my images is also somewhat rooted in Eastern European taste. It’s quite a mysterious link since I didn’t see any of their products until some time after I changed the way I depict the world, transitioning from the grotesque to classic figuration between 2004 and 2005.

Santiago Caruso painting 2 

DAVIS
  What sorts of media do you use? Can you tell us about your process of painting?

CARUSO
 I usually use ink and watercolors. The ink is applied over a plastered cardboard and is later scratched with a cutter to depict the lighting. There is no sketch, so I work slowly, using the shape of spots of ink from the base, to construct my figures in there, in the shadows.


Recently, to save time, I returned to tempera and acrylics images with a textural mood in a dark tone like my other scratched art. I want to paint again in oils, after almost ten years. I’ll see if I find the time for it.

DAVIS
  In Argentina, are there other visual artists, poets, authors who are pursuing the same sort of art and style as you?

CARUSO
  Yes, while exploring art, I’ve found others like Guillermo Roux, Quique Alcatena, and Federico Parolo, who present a world of strangeness and symbolisms. 

Federico Parolo


If I go far enough in the past, I’ve also enjoyed the engravings of Víctor Delhez, a Belgian-born artist, raised in Argentina since his youth, who has illustrated Lord Dunsany, Charles Baudelaire, and Saint John’s Apocalypse. 

Victor Delhez

In writing, I’ll mention María Negroni and Ángel Olgoso, who give a poetic treatment of the fantastique. Lastly, I made some illustrations for a book of Olgoso, which is still looking for a publisher.

DAVIS
  What do you consider as some of your best pieces?

CARUSO
  Time will tell, but I’ll mention Portrait of Crime and Wunderkammer. Anyway, the best painting is the one I haven’t done yet!


DAVID DAVIS

Footnote
Please note that I have reformatted this article and added my own selection of images.
To see the original interview, please click on the link below:

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