‘Advent’
Hollywood Art and Culture Center, FL 2013
Curated by Jane Hart.

Francesco LoCastro must have had a lot on his mind when he constructed the paintings that comprise his recently opened “Advent” show at the Art and Culture Center. Enormous, larger-than-life, unquantifiable themes percolate from the artist’s colorful and exhilarating work, which reinterprets geometric abstraction for the 21st century through inventive bursts of epoxy resin. There are sometimes subtle, sometimes vast differences between the paintings, but they all embody a clutter of soft-hued, three-dimensional shapes that suggest no less than the very creation of our world.

The evolution of nothingness to somethingness and, perhaps, back again to nothingness, is right there in the titles of his pieces: “Zygote,” “Gamete,” “Vessel: The Beginning of All Things,” “Portrait of a Civilization,” “Exodus,” “Vessel: The End of All Things.” In “World in a Wire” (I love the Rainer Werner Fassbinder reference in the title), sleek lines and bars surround what might be called the God Particle. Many of LoCastro’s paintings contain what appear to be towering buildings and pyramids that might have either sprouted from nothing or are collapsing into it; at any rate, each piece is like its own Big Bang, a universe of shapes expanding and forming ephemeral elements.

If you don’t see universal creation, perhaps you see the psychedelic shards of biotech ingenuity. This may very well be art for the Information Age – pictorial representations of the nuts and bolts that create our microprocessors and computer chips that wire our globe. Either way, each piece, no matter how small, staggers the mind and opens it to a myriad of possibilities, and they are well worth the time to lose yourself within them.

-Boca Magazine