Casey Kaplan

Jordan Casteel presents a series of seven intimately scaled oil paintings, composed en plein air. Zinnias, nasturtiums and dahlias are rendered true-to-scale and at peak bloom.

The floral bounties of Casteel’s own cultivated landscape mark the establishment of new routines and relationships within the community of her rural surroundings in Upstate New York. Composed in situ and immersed in the lush gardens of her home, Casteel positions herself on the ground and props the canvas in her lap. With a narrow field of vision, vegetal microcosms of the vast surrounding landscape are isolated. Casteel translates observations with confident and swift brushstrokes in real time rather than documenting on-the-go impressions amid the hustle of daily life in Harlem, NY, to be mapped and painted later. Petals and stems are built up through thick swathes of paint, memorialized in a flick of the wrist.

The tightly cropped compositions call to mind the artist’s ‘subway’ series, an ongoing body of work from 2015 that captures the candid exchange between commuters on the NYC subway. Relatable connections are registered with the informality of a gesture, from overlapping legs to clasped hands. The intrinsic bond between parent and child, projected with an outstretched arm in Within Reach (2019), is paralleled and personified in Garden (Dahlia) (2023). Drooping buds traverse each other, resting their weight on their counterpart to form a living trellis.

Ephemeral conditions of a landscape inform our behaviors of cohabitation and movements through shared space. Away from the sidewalks of Harlem (built on hundreds of years of shared histories) or the classroom at Newark University-Rutgers, where her student subjects operated within established systems of engagement, Casteel studies a landscape of her own making in a diaristic approach to color and form. Compositions of her hand-nurtured plants, seeded and sowed a year prior, serve as self-portraits—perennially flourishing and impermanent.