Art

I started this series as a strategic way of dealing with burnout; I wanted to be able to paint without thinking too much about the subject. (When I paint, I tend to give my mind a break, focusing only on observation, on rendering.) At the same time, I wanted to have a vehicle to read my subconscious. If the personal is political, and if all decision-making and pleasure is necessarily ideological, then perhaps I would learn more about my worldview by capturing and studying what catches my eye, the seemingly “random” pairings that, when analyzed, are probably not so random after all. Again, I am interested in dialectical relationships gleaned from what is visible.

The objects I select are taken from my everyday life. Seasonal fruit on our table, old toys, different vessels from around the house, clothes, books, things about to be discarded. As a child I loved to read, and among my favorites were the Eyewitness guides on various world cultures, Aztec, Viking, Ancient Greece, etc, different aspects of each culture explained by way of the most quotidian of artifacts: wine jars, an old broom, remains of a last meal, ceremonial ornaments and sculpture, tools, clothes. In the same way, this series is akin to contemporary archaeology, loosely centered around my life. It is both personal journal and social document. ∎

Castro’s formal foray into painting marks a turn in his output as a visual artist. Mainly working as a graphic and book designer over the past years, he recently rekindled a fascination with painting, producing this series of works since August 2012. Castro finds that painting—from the physical and spontaneous act of wielding the brush to letting loose coincidental choices and random musings—is a cathartic experience that deviates from the precise deliberation and purposiveness needed to visualize and execute graphic design projects. This first exhibition is his foray into the painter’s ways of seeing.

The visual motifs running through Two Things reflects Castro’s fascination with the process and politics of surfacing. The paintings all represent random pairs of objects: things that he has directly encountered from his immediate surroundings and which have, without fuss or fanfare, inserted themselves into the fabric of everyday life. Castro creates a visual diary here: vignettes of the ordinary, revisited. One chances upon a range of unlikely combinations: from musty discards to religious icons; from half-empty bottles to throwaway toys; from spent light bulbs to seasonal fruit and foodstuffs taken from the dinner table. All are personal and sundry trifles facing quiet collapse: things on the edge of being stored away or discarded.

The last stages of clearing away and discarding things are always the surprising moments: one will never really know what one will end up with, or how a thing has gotten there. These are the accidents that the works in Two Things are able to convey: transient configurations of form arising from chance encounters.

Castro further delves into the act of surfacing by randomly combining these different things into peculiar pairings, teasing out previously hidden connections between both in the process. Such juxtapositions seem strange at first but beckon for more introspection and questioning.What, for instance, do a jawbone and a green apple, a plastic sprayer and a glass shard, a bottle of rugby and a bald icon of the Christ child have in common? What allusions can such combinations convey? Numerous stories and connected narratives can arise from seemingly simple images.

In the end, the exhibition provides a window into what art can make possible. A dialectic tension between the visual and the subconscious arises: mere accidents become bearers of meaning while momentary dislocation births instances where it is possible to question and find one’s bearings again. In this way, Two Things poses questions to—and elicits answers from—the inquisitive mind. ∎