Remorses
Remorses is a series of paintings started in 2017, that Carlos Castro halted fleetingly and reignited once the pandemic began. The installation is like a living collage - composed with images sourced from personal photographs or from the internet - that will mutate in disposition and content throughout the course of the show. Each work has been painted in one day, a process which will continue, like an ongoing exercise of artistic labor. The project is a volatile archive of what catches the artist’ idiosyncratic eye, images, bits, and pieces of the universe that provide him the daily magic to stay afloat. The project is a volatile archive of what catches the artist’ idiosyncratic eye, images, bits, and pieces of the universe that provide him the daily magic to stay afloat.
There is much to be learned from Castro’s disciplined pursuit of painting and his historical consciousness. On view is the existential soul strength that the monotony brought on by the pandemic demands; crystallized moments that spill in time, his quarantine life strewn across the space like a rhizomatic maze that is still growing. Bread and Salt is now home to over one hundred works, but this incubator might sprout more, possibly reaching three hundred and eleven. Much like the painting that resembles a terrarium gone wild, abandoned, and reclaimed by nature. This image underscores the symbiotic relationship between the manmade and the natural world in a life-affirming way, like only closeness to death, which means nature, can make us be.
Remorse is not the poison of life, it has the power to heal. Remorses is Castro’s attempt at coagulating the present. He offers us an elixir for pandemic anxieties in an unadulterated form; it is a snapshot of a specific moment in time that lets us maintain the illusion that we can embrace and preserve what is forever fading away. So keep your eyes on the works while you can, remorse, is not for sale.
Monica Espinel