James Castle

James Castle’s works were collected by a small circle of admirers during his lifetime, but in recent years he has attracted unprecedented attention from both museums and the art market. After retrospectives at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2009) and Madrid’s Reina Sofía (2011), the Galerie Karsten Greve, in collaboration with the James Castle Collection and Archive, is currently presenting the artist’s first retrospective exhibition in France, with a selection of ninety-one works.

Born deaf, Castle spent his entire life on an isolated family farm in Idaho. He never learned how to speak, use sign language, read, or write. On first glance, his art might seem a strong example of naive art, folk art, or even art brut, as defined by Jean Dubuffet to describe the production of individuals on the margins of official (social or artistic) culture. Indeed, the way Castle worked is reminiscent of the methods used by artists associated with those movements. He created colors by blending his own saliva with stove soot, and his painting tools consisted of simple sharpened wooden sticks and soft rolled pieces of cardboard. Though skillfully rendered, the works evoke the spontaneity and primitiveness of children’s drawings. However, as Robert Storr has pointed out, the originality of Castle’s work––its frank descriptiveness, simplicity, diversity of form, and, in a broader sense, its formal and iconographic “classicism”––casts doubt on whether Castle should be placed in those categories that deeply inspired the early-twentieth-century avant-garde. Sometimes figurative and sometimes abstract, his images never portray imaginary worlds, as pieces by outsider artists so often do. On the contrary, Castle’s art is born out of his fascination with his immediate environment; the vision his works present is structured, calm, and perhaps quasi-photographic.

Translated from French by Jane Brodie.