“The Best Year of My Life:”Costanza Alvarez de Castro on her Life as an Artist in 2020

From her South American origins to the inspiration behind her art, to her participation in the 2020 edition of Rome Art Week, Costanza Alvarez de Castro talks about her role as an artist in Twenty-first-century Italy.

photography: Jacopo Olmo Antinori

Born and raised in Rome, artist Costanza Alvarez de Castro divides herself between two cultures: the Italian classicism and the wild nature of her mother’s home country El Salvador, which she used to visit especially when she was younger. Her studio in Via di Monserrato is part of an ancient building characterized by Etruscan influences and former habitation of Monsignor Podocataro.

After realizing a degree in Economics wasn’t the right career for her, she started working in set designing for movies and theater, and she was lucky enough to work for Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci’s last film Io e te where she met Jean Rabasse, a French set designer that also worked with Roman Polansky and the Cirque du Soleil. Her nearly perfect knowledge of French acquired during her experience in a francophone school she attended as a child benefited her professional relationship with Jean Rabasse for whom she would translate everything on an all-Italian movie set. Thanks to him, Costanza finally understood what path she was supposed to take.

Soon after, she enrolled in the very traditional painting school Institut Supérieur de Peinture Van Der Kelen and Logelain in Belgium, learning the basics of what was going to be her full-time job. When she came back to Rome, she took a role at the Opera Theater to paint backdrops. However, even this career didn’t turn out to be ideal for her. “I wanted my work to be more personal. Working in theater as a painter, you have to follow certain rules, you are not free to explore,” she said. So, she decided to quit this job in set design to paint for a living, which she has been doing for eight years.

How did she understand this was the right choice for her? To answer this question, Costanza draws a comparison between art and dance which, to her, are “two complete opposite things:” in fact, when she used to do high-level dancing, she had to work hard because, as she explains, she didn’t have that natural talent that her peers. Instead, painting has always come natural to her. “It’s a gift I need to preserve. It’s a vocation. Something you have to commit to your whole life. I love my job but it’s not something that you choose, or at least that was it for me,” she said.

Pomegranates & Lemons

Various tools in Costanza’s studio

Her artistic influences are strongly related to her origins from South America. Since El Salvador is a very dangerous country, her mother’s family moved to Costa Rica, where she spent a lot of time during her youth, and, although she doesn’t go that often anymore, she’s still attached to this side of her family. Her degree in Economy for International Development Cooperation was aimed to helping third-world countries by financing small projects through art.

Although she didn’t stick solely to this project eventually, the colors in her paintings are strongly inspired by Latin America, especially during the period she used to paint forests and jungles that reminded her of her childhood. However, the form that most represents her art is still life: according to her, it’s not just being good at drawing, but it’s rather the research of a form of painting and a creative process. Therefore, she started painting pomegranates and lemons and then her style developed from there. “I love classical art and the work that’s behind it,” she says. “I try to make the classical subject more contemporary through composition, dimensions and colors.”

Image: Marilù Ciabattoni

Apart from still life, there is another artistic genre that deeply characterizes her paintings, and that genre is portrait. However, she makes portraits only when her models are available to pose. Rejecting working through photographs, not everyone can understand the process that hides behind a painting: it’s happened that, for instance, someone who commissioned a portrait eventually didn’t like the finished work because they didn’t recognize themselves in the painting. “It’s complicated because we are so accustomed to photographs that we constantly see ourselves in a certain way, while a portrait entails the vision of someone else. And that’s the sense behind a portrait,” she explains.

That might be why she doesn’t receive that many paid portrait submissions. Usually, when she finds someone that looks interesting, she asks them is if they can pose for her. If she doesn’t know the person personally, all she knows is whether her portrait looks like the picture. However, the main subject of her portraits remains her brother. “There’s a moment when I have to understand whether it’s him or not,” she says.

2020: A Lucky Year

Costanza Alvarez de Castro posing in her studio

“My daily life is similar to a lockdown,” she says. “Usually I’m painting all day, and I only go out when I go for groceries.” Productivity-wise, nothing has changed for her. Since she makes a living out if this, her life is influenced by the interest of the public towards your works, which sometimes is there and sometimes it isn’t. However, you get used to it. Costanza is sure about the fact that 2020 was the best year she’s had so far, although she doesn’t exactly know why. “Maybe, by staying home a lot, people looked at their empty walls and felt the need to decorate their houses with art,” she hypothesizes.

One of the reasons why 2020 was a lucky year was the initiative Rome Art Week (or RAW), where she recently exhibited some of her paintings. Taking place in October, Rome Art Week is organized by the Kou Association and, since the year it started, it has involved 150 galleries and institutions, 334 artists and 28 curators. They have brought to life 321 events, of which 139 open studios, such as the one Costanza took part in.

“We have invited critics and authoritative operators from the contemporary art industry to give their vision of the state of contemporary art in Rome and to provide us with a guide to the routes to visit during the RAW week. The routes will be freely chosen according to personal artistic trends,” the organizers wrote on their website.

The 321 events that took place during the 2020 edition of RAW were proposed by the 119 artistic institutions, 349 artists and 44 curators. The 2021 edition of Rome Art Week will take place from Oct. 25 to 30.

The founders—the Kou Association—did all by themselves and looked for sponsors for the event, without asking artists for money to participate. By starting little by little, with time it became more and more successful. Costanza didn’t miss this unique opportunity to open her studio to Roman passer-byes in Via di Monserrato, where her home and studio are. Even after everything that happened this year, people showed interest in this initiative and visited the studios of the artists that participated. She has a long history with Kou Gallery, the organizers of RAW. He runs Kou Gallery in via della Barchetta, very close to Costanza’s studio.

Apart from her collaboration with Kou Gallery, most of her visibility comes from Instagram. Many people don’t even know she has a website, she says, because they are not as immediate and direct as social media.

Instagram also allows you to show the dimensions of the painting, since she usually poses next to them to give an idea of how big they are. “On websites, for instance, you have to click on the works section and the type of works. Usually, people don’t have time to calculate the dimensions,” she says.

Most of her clients are from Rome, some from the United States and South America, but she also has works in Vienna, London and France. Two of her works were featured in a group show in the Museum of Modern Art in El Salvador. Although she loves Rome, she explains, she would like her work to go abroad. But this requires time, time that she can afford putting into her work.

by Marilù Ciabattoni

Interviews translated from Italian by Marilù Ciabattoni

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