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JORDAN CASTEEL

JORDAN CASTEEL (B. 1989) Jiréh signed and dated '2013 Jordan Casteel' (on the reverse) oil on canvas 72 x 52 in. (182.9 x 132.1 cm.) Painted in 2013. Provenance Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner, 2014 Literature S. Pollard, Black Art: In the Absence of Light, 2021 (video). Exhibited New York, Sargent’s Daughters, Visible Man, August-September 2014. Denver Art Museum and Palo Alto, Cantor Museum at Stanford, Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze, February 2019-February 2020, p. 23, no. 5 (illustrated and detail view illustrated on the front cover). New York, New Museum, Jordan Casteel: Within Reach, February-May 2020, pp. 50-51 (illustrated). Painted in 2013, Jiréh is an important painting by Jordan Casteel, the first of her large-scale portrayals of the Black male nude in which she employs a palette of rich high-keyed color to challenge our understanding of the nature of Blackness. The sitter is Mansa Ra, formally known as Jiréh Breon Holder, a playwright and theater director who subsequently became friends with the artist, and although it is his penetrating gaze that holds our attention, Casteel’s paintings are as much about challenging our assumptions of color, as they are about the personality of the individuals she portrays. Exhibited in retrospectives at the Denver Museum of Art and the New Museum in New York, Jiréh has been widely included in the literature about the artist, including in the recent Black Art: In the Absence of Light HBO documentary. Consequently, Casteel has become one of the most distinguished painters of her generation, celebrated not only for her perceptive portraits of people too often ignored by the art historical canon, but also her ability to create fully rounded portraits of her sitters. Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem—where Casteel completed a residency in 2016—commented, “What we see when we look at one of Jordan’s portraits is her ability to represent her subjects in their fullness. She is able to capture a sense of spirit, a sense of self, a sense of soul” (T. Golden, quoted by Z. Lescaze, “Jordan Casteel Won’t Let You Look Away,” New York Times, February 14, 2020, via https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/ar... [accessed 2/23/2021]) In a sparsely furnished room, the figure of Jiréh sits naked on a sofa. Almost subsumed by the bold print of the fabric, he stares out at the viewer, engaging us with his gaze. Mirroring the pattern of the upholstery, the sitter’s skin is rendered in subtle shifts of luminous, almost iridescent, blues, greens, and whites, combined with soft pastel shades. In choosing to depict Black skin in this way, Casteel says she wants to engage with biases we all bring to the canvas and begin a debate about the true nature of color. “Blackness is really versatile,” she says, “it’s complicated, it is expansive, it is a mosaic, and it can be a multiplicity of things at any given time, and color is just a tool for me to explore that” (J. Casteel, interview with New Museum, New York, via https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions... [accessed 2/22/2021]). Next to the sofa is a low wooden table on which sits a plant. This motif was the first time that Casteel had used this particular device in her work, a twisting line that helps to draw the eye into the composition, across to the figure’s gaze, traversing the bold fabric of the sofa before leading you back out again, allowing—as Casteel describes it—the form of Jiréh to become a full figure. This is the first in a series of portraits in which Casteel focused on the Black male nude, paintings that have subsequently become some of the most critically acclaimed of her oeuvre. A female artist painting the naked male body is still an unusual occurrence, even in the twenty-first century, and Casteel remains conscious of the different voice that she brings to her subversion of the usual narrative of the ‘male gaze.’ By activating her sitters gaze, she is challenging centuries of art historical tradition. “Their direct gaze is a critical part of the reciprocal relationship. I am trying to foster between the painting, the person represented, and the viewer… I spent the first few years of my practice focused on representing my relationship to black men as a black woman,” she continues. “Although women were not physically represented in those early works, my hand, labor, and engagement could not be ignored—although it often was. As my practice has grown and developed, I think a lot about how we prematurely gender people in an effort to make sense of our relationships to one another. What changes for the viewer if they know the subject or artist is a man or woman? It is our ability to see people as they are that I am most interested in as well as answering some of those questions in the least prescriptive way possible”