CALEB CONSIDINE

In a couple of older paintings by Caleb Considine, we see an object directly referencing a passage from a novel—an accordion stretching out the word ‘pessimism’; or a foam cannonball etched with a specific phrase—shown sitting among studio clutter. The object is stranded between realms; it is a deposit from a series of transfers or insertions, from narrative description on the page, to materialising on a studio couch in Brooklyn, then again to a flat rendering on the canvas. Along the way, its meaning has been dislocated. And this suspense of subject matter seems to hold true with the other things the artist paints, whether from fiction or fragments of reality. There is an absence to the images as they are painted—the vacant face of a best friend, a subway platform sucked of people, an object that already is substituting for something else—that suggests they are not where the content lies. But then these are not images simply made in the service of observational realist painting, either; they are too clearly singled out for that. This sense of content being astray has to do also with the process’ vying for significance. The paintings’ rendering is daily and insistently on the surface, though still not expressive enough to overtake the subject. The things are faithfully reconstituted.