As a friend, as an impertient, and obssesive photographer, as a filmmaker, I see Juanjo Castillo attempting to interpret the reality that, sometimes we tend to ignore ignore in the life of our cities.

       Juanjo’s paintings (painted pictures and therefore transformed, of surprised people, held in time, as if they were human mannequins), are but fascinating in their staticism and expressiveness, and at the same time, they seem ready to abandon at any time the deaf conversartion they are having, to start walking and mingleling in the human anthill that line the streets and the avenues of the city.

      If the picture is what's sudden and moving held forever when pressing the camera trigger, painting, on the contrary is the creative elaboration that rises from the transformation of this reality. The incursion of photography made the process of desintegration go faster (or if one wants the opposite: research of new possibilities) and painting would never be what it was.

      Juanjo wants to take part actively in this process of presenting beings of his surrounding and to do so he appeals to a deliberate staticism. The beings reflected in his work, are and are not recognizible, because they have something that removes them from everyday life, expressed in the gestures, in the clothing, in the pets that come with them, in the light clues that indicates us that we are in a city and in its streets.

     In our walking we meet men and women that stand still, maybe witnesses of a catastrophe that froze their steps. We cross through a world held in time, and in this world we recognize ourselves and we recognize those beings immobilized by this painter-photographer who is Juanjo Castillo.

           I myself have tried, and i still do, in a similar but different way, with the same intention of working with a photographic base for reaching another level, a level both personal and creative. I understand his motivation and I have no doubt in telling him that this way is opened to an infinite number of posibilities.