Ordinary, mundane things can convey meanings beyond their nondescript functions, a quiet beauty beneath their surfaces. Aesthetic pleasure and symbolic tension can be drawn out through chance configurations, from a fitting randomness.

The possibilities inherent in such incidental pairings are explored in this first solo exhibition by graphic designer Karl Fredrick M. Castro, on view until February 8 at the 20 Square space of Silverlens. Entitled Two Things, the exhibit is a collection of still life acrylic paintings arranged in unlikely pairs and surprising binaries, combining both the artisanal and artifactual.

The works in Two Things are small and portable images of everyday objects juxtaposed against each other and set against spartan and scrubbed walls. Their size and subject matter both work to create a sense of familiarity and comfort, in stark contrast to the imposing scale, grandness and immobility often exuded by larger than life canvases. These are far from being portraits of the wantonly abject, degraded and torn; instead, they are accidental visions of things left behind, picked up along the way. Portrayed in muted tones and exhibiting a momentary stillness, the paintings give off a sense of fluid repose, like that of sunlight streaming through water.

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.

-Lisa Ito

Image: © Karl Fredrick M. Castro
43-Journeys (Sneakers and Venus)
2013