Casto Solano
Casto Solano is an award winning artist and sculptor. He focuses on public spaces; on community and ecology. His pieces can be seen all over the world, predominantly in the USA, Canada and Europe.
Category: Artist/Individual
Discipline: Visual arts
Program Affiliations: Artist Roster
About Casto Solano
Casto Solano is an award winning sculptural and structural artist, native of the Basque Country in northern Spain. Dedicated to public spaces, with an outstanding international reputation for quality and a unique creative vision, over the last thirty years he has produced artworks for richly diverse environments and communities around the world, and is a leading figure in his field. Casto works in permanent and sustainable materials, fusing traditional techniques and the latest technology to create luminous and visually iconic artworks, which actively invite interaction and participation from the general public. Casto’s design philosophy is to create art that connects us though our shared ecology and culture. The quality and flair of his work has led to international recognition, awards for his services to the public realm, and a series of commissions that are as diverse as the spaces for which they have been created.
http://www.castosolano.com
Lough Neagh Discovery Center, Antrim, Northern Ireland, UK, 2022.
The Giant - The Protector at the Lough
This artwork is a monumental representation of the giant, Finn Mac Cool, framed against the shores of Lough Neagh, and outside “The Gateway”, a brand-new exhibition and heritage center dedicated to the discovery and exploration of the Lough and local heritage. The artwork traces a story-line through the books of the Dun Cow and of Leinster, through Yeats and Heaney, and on to today’s young storytellers. It creates a space that draws our paths to it and inspires us to look out across the waters in contemplation. As our ancestors stood and where our children will stand. In Antrim, at a Lough that sits like the axis of a wheel at the centre of five counties. A jewel of nature, our shared heritage and a means of sustenance, trade and communication between so many people for so many centuries. A channel for our stories and our imagination. The artwork is a love song to the Lough, to the land, and to Antrim’s communities and folklore.
Rond Pont du Bois de Rome, City of La Teste-de-Buch, France, 2021.
Amalur Child - Between the Sand and the Sea
Commissioned as a new landmark artwork for a gateway roundabout to the garden city of La Teste de Buch in Gironde, France, “Amalur Child: Between the Sand and the Sea” sits between dunes and forest, sky and sea. It depicts a timeless, gigantic head, sculpted in glimmering steel and open to the light and air. A head inhabited by forest roots and marine grasses. A head inhabited by the reeds of the dunes and the ocean breeze. An artwork that unites the elements in La Teste de Buch; that greets us and welcomes us into the exquisite beauty of Gironde’s Atlantic coast.
Kiest Park, City of Dallas, Texas, USA, 2020
We Are Music and Music Is Us
Music is sound with intelligence; sound controlled or provoked by thought. It’s the relationship between sound and silence, rhythm and meter; the most direct pathway to the human soul. This piece is be a moving tribute to the music of Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan, to our culture and to our communities. Sculpted in panels formed by ribbons of cut steel, like enormous guitar strings, sequences from their lives rise from the soil. Written in the metal, their lyrics tug at our heartstrings time and time again. A homage to the importance of music to the city of Dallas. To a legacy that will live on to inspire so many future generations.
Public Artist Art Roster
I have been creating artworks for the public realm for over three decades; this is my life's work and my passion. It began early in my life when as a young child I became fascinated by nature. I devoured the pages of dusty encyclopaedias: submerging myself in the complexities of minute, subterranean ant colonies and travelling across the infinite enormity of the sky full of stars. My response was to model with my hands, and my passion only keeps growing. So I create my artworks to live in symbiosis with the architectures, landscapes and communities that surround them. I create them to be impacting and iconic; engaging and comprehensive. I create them to follow the movement of light and shadow, and the way forms and emotions interact with space. I create them to last in time and be seen by many future generations. Most of all, I create artworks that connect directly and immediately to each person that experiences them. Sculptures that open up space for us to think and reflect, and that connect us: to each other and the incredible world that surrounds us. Through past, present and future; public art to bring us together.
