Bread & Salt, San Diego
February 27 – April 30, 2021
In Remorses and Other Maladies, Carlos Castro Arias constructs an aesthetic experience divided in three chapters. The first, Remorses, presents a series of paintings begun in 2017, that he halted fleetingly and reignited once the pandemic began. On view is the existential soul strength that the monotony brought on by the confinement requires; on view are 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.
Dark Splendor is the second chapter. In it, Castro’s unsettling furnace articulates the transformative power of fire by enveloping the viewer in a heated experience with the divine, its symbols, and pitfalls. The multiplicities in Dark Splendor allow for conflicting interpretations. Fire is inside, outside, and on screen. It is symbolic of creation, destruction, and the penuries of the soul, revealing an individual willing to question, expose, and accept the contradictions inherent in the fact that religious fervor and intolerance are sometimes flip sides of the same coin.
The final chapter, Castro’s Mythstories (2017-present), explores the relationship between the wondrous world of mythology and history in tapestries. Myths complement our understanding of history, which has its own truths and biases. Appropriating the style and iconography of medieval tapestries, Castro interlaces contemporary myths to create cross-temporal and cross-cultural connections with a rare blend of irreverence. He turns to medieval tapestries as the foundation for this series given that the turn from worship to inquiry, from unexamined mythology to history, had not yet occurred.
More information: https://www.breadandsaltsandiego.com/