Discreetly Illegal
The Photography of Celso Castro
By Asher Remy-Toledo

Celso Castro’s work is a bare-bulb erotic photo foray into the underbelly of Colombia’s drug world. His obsessive documentation of the cast of characters involved in the Colombian illegal drug trade informs his exhibition at The Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation. The exhibition features large-scale photographic works that explore the margins of this largely unseen world.

Castro’s labor-intensive, photo-collage works of drug kingpins, smugglers, hit men, country men, street vendors, soldiers, paramilitaries, kidnappers, and pimps pose showing with pride their erect penises to the voyeuristic viewer. They look back at us with a shameless stare. They play the game that moves between vanity and seduction.
These portraits both bring the unsuspected viewer to the unknown underground that most of us fear, and give humanity to the unabashed criminals portrayed here. The portraits make us feel guilty for allowing someone who we may think lacks humanity to be the object of our desire.
Castro’s photojournalistic style sizzles with raw sexuality and at the same time suggests an equally stark political and cultural reality.

The work of Celso Castro is about cultural attitudes in a society where the macho is revered. The fact that Castro decomposes his photographs in collage style is a way for the artist to go beyond what he sees — the decomposition of machismo not only on the physical level but in a conceptual one as well.

...

Celso Castro-Daza was born in Valledupar, Colombia. He has a BFA from Pratt Institute, 1981. He has exhibited extensively in Latin America and the U.S. His LLGAF exhibition, Discreetly Illegal, opens Nov. 7 and continues through Dec. 16, 2006. The exhibition is in cooperation with The Remy-Toledo Gallery, New York.