Carl Kostyál is delighted to present the second solo exhibition of Jure Kastelic (b. 1982 Slovenia, lives and works in Venice) with the gallery, ‘Cathedral and Bazaar’. The exhibition marks the artists’ debut in London.
With his body turned away from us, a poised traveller dressed all in white stands in a graceful contrapposto stance. Perilously alone, he is encased in what looks to be a cube of ornately framed glass, replete with golden baroque adornments, and so the scene looks as though the Palace of Versailles had dropped from the sky, and penned him in on all sides, while he was merely out for a stroll. This is Jure Kastelic’s After Caspar David Friedrich (all works 2025), from the artist’s visually arresting new body of work. But if Friedrich’s figure apprehends the sublime Elbe Sandstone Mountains in Saxony and Bohemia which stretch out before him, Kastelic’s ‘boy’ is locked in a gilded mise-en-abyme where there is no way out.
This predicament of being unable to find one’s ‘way out’ is everywhere in this series. They are pictures of containment and futility, resilience and fortitude, that reach back to the myths and fables of old. Kastelic’s extensive representation of threads, for instance, gestures to the Ancient Greek story of Ariadne and Theseus. But in Kastelic’s sun-drenched scenes, this meaning of the thread is inverted: we know we are lost in the minotaur’s labyrinth, and we have all the tools to lead us out of it, but we cannot find the exit.
Such moral, religious, and political questions motivate these paintings. They ask us to see more clearly our present through the make believe of the past. The title of the exhibition, Cathedral and Bazaar, is a reference to software developer Eric S. Raymond’s essay, and later book, on the dialectical tension between two architectural ideas: the cathedral is top-down, rule-following, secretive, certain of its gatekeepers; the bazaar, by contrast, is bottom-up, anarchic, open, and refuses authority. In his pictures, we find ourselves in the minotaur’s labyrinth – and we cannot find our way out.
– Matthew Holman
