Rafaela
Castillo
Rafaella Castillo is a Peruvian emerging artist represented by Maison Ménart and currently pursuing a BA (Hons) in Fine Art: Painting at Camberwell College of Arts (UAL). Trained in the arts from an early age, her practice explores the human figure through fluid distortion, saturated color, and gestural movement. Her compositions dissolve bodily boundaries, creating organic forms that evoke transformation, vulnerability, and the shifting nature of identity.
Why do Fallen Angels Look More Alive, 2025
252 x 72 cm, Oil on canvas
"The Nature of the Non-Existent" is a personal exploration of imaginary worlds created by human emotion. Through opposing nature of a pure angel and a fallen one, both versions of the same being, I reflect on inner duality, desire, and the burden of perfection.
While the pure angel turns away as the embodiment of idealization, the fallen angel radiates with color and energy, pitying its counterpart. The wings unite the figures, the one thing that connects them, despite opposing paths. This painting captures the tension between perfection and liberation, and asks whether our most "fallen" selves might be the most real."
Grab me by the heart, 2026
60 x 75 cm, Oil on canvas
"I reside somwehre quiet now, no one but myself looking at me through the surface of the in-between, the desolate face of a failure-bound spirit, in a place love will never reach, the pit of the grasp.
The search for the yearn has ended, but somewhere in my heart the light of hope still pulses alive. A mirage that reminds me I can still heal and come back intact, even for one second, in this moment, this illusion, right now"
My lamb, 2025
"Dearest pain, my pulse, my soul, my only reason to draw the rotten poem in the human carcass my life was laid upon.
My eyes reflect your grace in crystal form, the breach between your truth and your corroding disaster, in a place with no more than a door and a threat to sanity, home of your effect in me."
