Monica Castillo at Robert Miller - Brief Article

Monica Castillo spent the better part of the 1990s exploring the nuances of a single subject--her own face Over the course of the decade, she executed numerous self-portraits using a wide variety of materials, from the traditional (paint) to the unconventional (bread), in what she defined as an extended investigation into the nature of mimesis and representation. Recently, however, Castillo's patient fidelity to a single subject has given way to an exuberant eclecticism. In her exhibition of new work at Robert Miller, she showed a mix of paintings, painted objects, photographs and video, with nary a self-portrait in the bunch. An almost carnivalesque sensuality pervaded the show, but the same conceptual rigor that generated the self-portraits was clearly a driving force in the new work, too.

At the heart of the show were several works that used painted flowers to set up an ambiguous zone somewhere between depiction and actuality. In the two paintings Forty Days and Blancalilly, flower petals were covered in oil paint and stuck directly to the canvas support in pretty, naive-looking arrangements that suggested the work of an amateur botanist. Here the illusion of pictorial space was abolished, and the canvas became a sort of specimen tray. The inert, thickly-coated petals protruding from the canvas seemed like a parody of overwrought impasto.

The same deadpan sensibility infused the short video Dancer's Self-Portrait, in which a dancer in a yellow leotard appeared against a background of mint-green plastic tarps. Oversized cuffs composed of small canisters of paint were strapped to her wrists and ankles. As the stony-faced performer executed a series of ballet movements, raising high her arms and legs, the paint spilled from the canisters and splashed dramatically across her body and the tarps, creating an Abstract-Expressionist painting in commedia dell'arte colors.

In the show's other video work, Pictorial Effects, three small adjacent monitors showed looping videos of an eye, a man's genitals and a nipple. In each work, a hand holding a small, soft, wet paint brush was shown stimulating the respective body part, which then visibly responded to the touch of the brush, either by producing tears or by growing erect. This piece seemed to tread knowingly along the edges of the risible, but its ultimate affect was oddly poignant. With its playful, pointed use of flowers and flesh, Castillo's recent work keeps tongue in cheek while asking serious questions about the paradoxes of touching and looking, sensing and perceiving.

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