Francisco Castro
"Francisco Castro" by Gary Michael Dault, Winter 2007, pp. 108-09
For his second exhibition at Diaz Contemporary, the Mexico City–based artist Francisco Castro once again offered paintings based on the grid, which for a century has been a primary means of modernist visual organization. As Rosalind Krauss noted in her 1993 book The Optical Unconscious, the grid “is also a picture of pure immediacy”; it “dispenses with narrative.” Although we live in a world shot through and bound by narrative (CNN is a bigger influence on the visual arts today than other art is), the grid remains a visual filter that catches and holds back a certain kind of mostly literary discourse from a painting. It acts as a clarified route back to the kind of inchoate information (colour, shape, texture, duration, density) that sometimes doesn’t feel like information at all. What is left to a painting after gridding is usually a residue of big, calm, rather mute ideas.
Given that the grid is a traditional method of organizing and purifying space, what use can be made of the grid now—beyond revisiting it as formal nostalgia for past pictorial solutions untouched by the present moment in art-making?
In Castro’s hands, the time-honoured grid is cleansed and refurbished, though also made residual. Used and abused to the point of attenuation, it now appears scarcely able to hold in place its inherited burden of squares: they grow vagrant (as in the two navy-blue and dishwater-grey Variación en Azul works), often either ending up slightly out of alignment or wandering away on their own into areas of the canvas that are not allocated to them. It’s as if the couplings that hold the squares to the grid have become loose with wear, to the point that squares sag and shuttle themselves out of the spatial rectitude for which they seemed originally destined.
But there is more to Castro’s reworking of gridlock than just the spatial disposition (or indisposition) of formal building blocks within each painting. His performative colour is just as important. In paintings like Variaciones Sobre Fondo Blanco and Movimientos Verde y Rojo, for example, dun and grey squares are held in place (barely) by thin, rather electric demarcation lines that pulse, flicker and surge. These softly painted lengths of bright gold, green, blue and red seem more animated and unruly than the squares they are supposed to control, so that what would normally be merely lines of subdivision now push forward into the realm of the figural. Formally speaking, the “walls” are more interesting than the “rooms.”
Except in one sense: Castro’s captive squares are a mess—an attractive, absorbing, engaging mess, certainly, but a mess nevertheless. Rather than labouring to cleanse his squares and rectangles so that they can serve as something like pure, meditative way stations, Castro musses them up (it sometimes looks as if he has cleaned his brushes on them). Most of his squares look streaky, like hurriedly cleaned windows (what the painter calls “configured” abstraction). Viewed as an accumulated mass (and how else can you look at a gridded painting?), this continuum of smears, stains and painterly incidents and accidents comes to seem like one great field, over which nets of worn gridding have been thrown (Castro calls them “displacements”)—which are delicious to look at but which fail utterly as control. So while the paintings look rigid and regular at first, they become the stuff of a constant and continuing encounter.
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