Daniele Castellano’s vivid drawings are the stuff that dreams (and nightmares) are made of

Illustrator Daniele Castellano’s vivid drawings are many things: spooky, hyper detailed, fantastical and never boring. With imagery based on the mysteries of memory, psychology and “bodily sensations”, Daniele frequently engages with mythology, drawing from symbology from dream worlds and the ambiguous, unnerving narratives hidden inside. Sometimes, Daniele depicts classic imagery that we’ve all seen in horror movies: sinister, glowing eyes peeking out from under the bed, ethereal ghosts in the woods, the curses that inspire superstitions – and other times, Daniele is directly inspired by gentler forms of fantasy, especially the dragon genre.

It’s like a whole new series of Eragon, where each dragon has its own visual personality and somehow, in a genre of drawing that has seemingly covered every type of dragon ever conceived, Daniele finds new ground. In Elder in the Grove, for example, a wine-coloured dragon lies curled up behind a smattering of autumn leaves. It’s not fearsome, but a part of what makes Daniele’s magical worlds feel close to ours. Inspired by the illustrated books of Edward Gorey, Chris Van Allsburg, Guy Billout and Luigi Serafini, the author of the Codex Seraphinianus, Daniele channels the “imaginative freedom and enigmatic logic” found in their works into his own.

Through a dialogue between observations and “inner imagery”, Daniele constructs visual spaces that sit between the ancient and somewhere “suspended outside of time” – and in the process, creating work that simultaneously looks like a wistful children’s book and something that could still send shivers down the spine of the average, albeit superstitious, adult.