Jordan Casteel, Harold, 2017. Oil on canvas, 78 × 60 inches (198.1 × 152.4 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan. Photo: Jason Wyche
Jordan Casteel’s dedication to contemporary portraiture is founded on a deep commitment to the representation of her subjects’ humanity. Alongside her loose, fluid figuration, single washes of color often dominate her large canvases—a technique employed to illuminate and define the subjects depicted, ensuring that they are profoundly seen. There is a familiarity in her portraits, too. An inextricable tie between the gazes of artist and subject renders the people she paints in incredible fullness, producing palpable form as well as an acutely realized sense of soul.
Early on in her practice, Casteel painted nude Black male figures in domestic spaces. In these works, her subjects’ belongings, interior spaces, and poses give life to inner worlds often neglected in representations of Black men. Simultaneously, her move to Harlem in 2015 had an enormous impact on her practice, spurring her to create a vocabulary for emotional intimacy with her subjects that went beyond the boundaries of the home. In Harold (2017)—part of her Nights in Harlem series of life-size depictions of storefronts dotting the neighborhood’s streets—and Medinilla, Wanda, and Annelise (2019), the subjects knowingly return the artist’s gaze.These everyday individuals are not posed, but resplendent in their own natural environment. Seemingly autonomous and unmoved, their fixed looks are a powerful acknowledgment of their being seen.
Paintings by Casteel in the Hill Collection highlight the artist’s ability to galvanize the medium and chart a new vocabulary in the field of portraiture, where a commitment to landscape and still life persists, with her subjects firmly at the center. In these works, she expands on the possibility of site and the architecture of community, as her subjects’ surroundings become extensions of their personhood. The relationship between artist and subject is thus stabilized, giving way to a painterly practice that seeks exchange and prioritizes humanistic observance.
Jordan Casteel’s dedication to contemporary portraiture is founded on a deep commitment to the representation of her subjects’ humanity. Alongside her loose, fluid figuration, single washes of color often dominate her large canvases—a technique employed to illuminate and define the subjects depicted, ensuring that they are profoundly seen. There is a familiarity in her portraits, too. An inextricable tie between the gazes of artist and subject renders the people she paints in incredible fullness, producing palpable form as well as an acutely realized sense of soul.
Early on in her practice, Casteel painted nude Black male figures in domestic spaces. In these works, her subjects’ belongings, interior spaces, and poses give life to inner worlds often neglected in representations of Black men. Simultaneously, her move to Harlem in 2015 had an enormous impact on her practice, spurring her to create a vocabulary for emotional intimacy with her subjects that went beyond the boundaries of the home. In Harold (2017)—part of her Nights in Harlem series of life-size depictions of storefronts dotting the neighborhood’s streets—and Medinilla, Wanda, and Annelise (2019), the subjects knowingly return the artist’s gaze. These everyday individuals are not posed, but resplendent in their own natural environment. Seemingly autonomous and unmoved, their fixed looks are a powerful acknowledgment of their being seen.
Paintings by Casteel in the Hill Collection highlight the artist’s ability to galvanize the medium and chart a new vocabulary in the field of portraiture, where a commitment to landscape and still life persists, with her subjects firmly at the center. In these works, she expands on the possibility of site and the architecture of community, as her subjects’ surroundings become extensions of their personhood. The relationship between artist and subject is thus stabilized, giving way to a painterly practice that seeks exchange and prioritizes humanistic observance.