Madeline Casteel
Town
May 11 - June 9, 2024
Town is six paintings:
1. Assistant
2. Church
3. Star of Bethlehem
4. Car
5. Donkey
6. Singer
Each of the works included in Town is an individual entity. Together they form a small community, each with its own role and varying levels of tension to the others.
The artist’s work is made through a process of building each painting’s surface and breaking it down continually until a density and haptic quality is found. Repetition happens on a single surface as paintings
are made over and over on top of themselves. The resulting marks are both additive painting strokes an scratches and recesses on the paintings’ surface. The works are treated somewhat like jewelry; tarnished with use and polished again.
Figures and structures operate as models within each painting—containers wherein the process of accumulation and erasure occurs. Less concerned with a fixed or shared narrative, image becomes form of concealment, fastened to a shifting surface—a costume for each painting to wear. The subject rendered holy or revered becomes bruised with devotion.
