Caren Golden Fine Art is pleased to present Bradley Castellanos’ “The Divide.” Known for his harmonious pairing of two unlikely mediums – photography and painting – Castellanos resumes his exploration of these media in depth, scaling back on his use of resin in order to bring the other components into high relief. With its tradition as a documentary agent and an objective recorder of the visual universe, photography has cultivated a culture distinct from the expressive subjectivity of painting. Castellanos harnesses the inherent differences in the each medium and, by blending them, uses them as metaphors for extra-artistic dualities: culture vs. nature; abstract vs. concrete; virtual vs. actual.

These oppositions provide the conceptual scaffolding for the nine new works comprising his second solo show with Caren Golden Fine Art. In the absence of toxic spills, synthetic hues and expanses of resin, these subtler issues come to the fore. Paintings such as “Motel,” retain the directness of their original large-format photographs, even as passes of abstract painting peek through the negative spaces meticulously cut away around tree trunks, branches and leaves. Castellanos seamlessly braids painting and photo-collage into a whole in which mysterious vignettes transcend the sums of either medium. Often bringing the natural and the man-made worlds into confrontation, the content in these works, such as the trident wielding Roman god of the sea perched on a man-made fountain in “Neptune”, function in similar ways in their ability to resolve seemingly incongruous elements into captivating and slightly askew compositions.

Bradley Castellanos’ paintings have been widely exhibited in museum and cultural institutions including PS 1, The Nueberger Museum in Purchase, NY, The McDonough Museum of Art in Youngstown, Ohio and The Brooklyn Academy of Music. His work was presented last summer in a solo exhibition at Mogadishni Gallery in Denmark and have been exhibited in Salzburg, Austria; Turino, Italy and San Francisco, CA as well as in numerous group exhibitions in New York City. “The Divide” is Bradley Castellanos’ second solo exhibition with Caren Golden Fine Art.