“I make art for sensitive souls, so they can discover that their difference is a gift, not a burden.”

Ricardo Castro is a photographer and choreographer. His work is shaped by a deeply queer and spiritual gaze, transforming vulnerability into power. Inspired by the painting of the Spanish Golden Age, he draws on the aesthetics of baroque chiaroscuro—once reserved for saints, martyrs, and nobles—to depict what was once unthinkable: desire between men, non-normative tenderness, and femininity in dissident bodies.

His work is born from a desire to turn repression into beauty, and he does so through a gaze that is unapologetically queer: resistant, intimate, and untamed.

In his series “Forbidden”, selected for MADO 2025, he revisits his childhood, when he was forbidden to dance.

“In the darkness of a wardrobe full of flamenco dresses, I found my light.”

In secret, he dressed in his mother’s gowns and hid in the wardrobe to dance. Today, those photographs do more than recall that act—they transform it into an expression of liberation, redemption, and poetic beauty.

His art is an invitation to all the sensitive, dreaming souls who have been called “too much”—too emotional, too different, too intense—so they can discover that their sensitivity is strength, their difference is inspiration, and that within them lives a universe capable of changing the world.