Neon shards of light and dark are this painter’s medium

Francesco LoCastro’s new paintings are a pulsating mix between abstract eruptions and pop-infused realism. They’re sleek, calculated, but, at the same time, completely guttural. “I make the best decisions when I don’t think about them too much,” LoCastro says. “It doesn’t come from logic. It comes from something more primal than that.”

After years curating, organizing, and working to make South Florida’s art scene sizzle, LoCastro has taken some time out—“I’ve been trying to come back to silence and get rid of all the noise, clutter and outside pressures”—to pin down exactly what he wants to say in his own art. What he’s finding is that his connection to counter-culture irreverence and free-spirited imagery may all be part of a subconscious search that started years ago.

LoCastro grew up in the middle of a culture clash. He spent his childhood in Germany and, at one point, lived near Stammheim Prison. Members of the Red Army Faction, the anti-imperialist group that, among other affronts, killed high ranking officials and hijacked an airliner, were held at Stammheim, and the prison acts as an unhappy symbol of what happens when youthful unrest veers out of control. “I saw all of that go down, and it’s taken me this long to digest it,” LoCastro says.

When he left Germany for Ft. Lauderdale, LoCastro was 17. He caught wind of the iconoclastic underground festering in New York and California and when he saw an issue of Juxtapoz with Mark Ryden, king of lush phantasmagoria, on the cover, “it all just kind fell into place.” The “lowbrow” language of Ryden and other artists in that scene was one LoCastro could speak to. And though he’d grown up thinking of drawing as a hobby, not a career, he soon had his first show at San Francisco’s Shooting Gallery.

Since then, LoCastro, who still works out of Ft. Lauderdale, has exhibited nationally, spearheaded exhibitions that included artists like Shepard Fairey and Dalek, and started the Vanguard Art Fair—he wanted “to show artists that they could be as free as they want.”

And now, even though he suspects the underground scene he’s championed is about to break open, LoCastro is laying low, revisiting his youth, rediscovering himself, and making resin covered paintings that marry flare-ups of color with controlled rendering. “I have more fun doing these than I ever have,” he says, “because I feel like they’re more my voice than me trying to be part of anything that’s been done before.” –Catherine Wagley / Hurley Art