Looking at a painting with words on it and mumbling them under your breath, just to taste the text and learn how it feels in the space beyond the surface of the work. Glenn Ligon, one of the most significant Black Concept artists of the last few decades, once said in an interview that “I believe very much in the knowledge of the body, in what your body memorizes that comes with the reading.”1 Orlando-based artist Bryan Castro’s exhibition to stutter / to atomize / to interrupt at D.D.D.D. in New York is very much contingent on this “knowledge of the body,” through all the traveling the words have to make to minds and tongues to ignite a sense of transcendence. Castro is a person who stutters, and by using the so-called “literary stutter,” that is, a phonetic transcription of his own pronunciations, the artist projects his voice and body onto the viewer.
Twenty-three pieces in different mediums and supports share a uniform, black background, a reference to blackboards and digital screens. The words are always present, but they feel like tails sticking out of burrows, waiting for the artworks’ meanings to be yanked out. Some pieces are springboards for complex, layered critiques of the current state of America. In Ms.Wave’s Bedroom Studio (2024-2025), a judge’s hammer protrudes from a marine painting to break the mirror used by a banana-shaped woman with a makeshift “Let’s make America great” pin on her chest. The waves in the painting-within-a-painting come from the stutter pride flag designed by activist Conor Foran in 2022. Here, Castro is going for a surreal political cartoon in the spirit of Philip Guston, an early inspiration.
10 x 13 inches. Photograph by Andrew Schwartz and courtesy of D.D.D.D., New York City.
10 x 13 inches. Photograph by Andrew Schwartz and courtesy of D.D.D.D., New York City
Several pieces in the show find Castro atomize and interrupt Guston’s iconography, just like the title of the show suggests. At times, Guston’s paintings get quoted in full such as in (An Artist’s Page (llllLLLANGUAGE), (2024-2025). Here, the late painter’s pile of pinkish fleshy forms is overlayed with the word ‘language,’ the title of the original work.
In other works, meanings hide in layers of trompe l’oil. Paper is blackboard, blackboard is karaoke screen, frames frame frames. Text is immediate, text is conceptual, text is, for example, WEEE THE P-PPEOPLE WWW-WWWWORKING (A Construction Sign Within a Blackboard (Wee the/P-PPeople/WWW-WW/WWorking), (2024-2025), a combination of America’s founding document and its leading ideology. For Castro, however, this practice is not about seeking recognition of his uniqueness. He proposes an aesthetic of stuttering. Castro quotes media theorist Andrew Brooks’s appeal to “make whiteness stutter,” but goes one step further to make blackness stutter as well. In Castro’s work, “whiteness” and “blackness” function both as social and racial categories, and as literal blocks of color. Sounding out the words influences the choice and their meaning—literal (color) or metaphorical (race). When every word takes time, the meaning is not assigned unthinkingly or automatically. For Castro, stutter negates the possibility of an unreflective self-acceptance.
[1] Ligon, Glenn, Scott Rothkopf, host institution Whitney Museum of American Art, host institution Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and host institution Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Yourself in the World : Selected Writings and Interviews / Glenn Ligon ; Edited by Scott Rothkopf. Edited by Scott Rothkopf. New Haven, Conn. ; Yale University Press, in association with Whitney Museum of American Art, 2011, p. 80.
