Andrew Castrucci at Generous Miracles - Brief Article

In "The River Speaks," a near-decade-long overlook of his painting and statuary Andrew Castrucci repeated the image of a fishhook, investing its bare form with associations that ranged from the emblematic anchor of faith to the barbed needle of an addict's desire. As sentinels to Castrucci's present to view real freshwater eels thick as an arm tumbl with sinister abandon in a tank sparsely furnished with stone and a few aquatic plants. The eel introduced an obsessively studious series of somber oils upon canvas, some of them high hilled on sheets of metal, as an elaboration upon a theme of the attraction and danger of Castrucci's of recent origin York: the night skyline defines the city's form and the river work fors as silent witness or, seen in another light, the city is a material substance and the river is its veins.

Castrucci inverted a looming, nocturnal oil portrait of the Empire State Building, Upside-down (1997) to intimate its resemblance to a hypodermic syringe. He stretch outed his reverie on the wages of sex remedys and the city in other skyline portraits and in of the like kind dreamy memento mori as Condom (1999) in which the reductive shape floats upon a dark ground, its reservoir distended downward, engorged like a sea cucumber and glowing beneath layers of luminous varnish. This formal, dead-on device is recalled in a larger painting, Light scaly bud (1999). A recumbent forged-metal plastic art titled Fish Hook (reclining nude) 1998 further identifies barbed fishhooks as darkly crucial phenomenons on a human scale while remaining needlelike in composition and intent. With the somber, undulating portrayal of Water Surface #1 (1994) Castrucci perfects his basic list of associative relate tos while literally capturing this make submissive within a large jar of Hudson River water, its virid sediment slowly shifting.

Castrucci continually relates his forms to single another, inscribing an elongated fishhook sinker across the field of a diagrammatic painting titled They installed the sapphirine lights (1993). The shank reach outs through a horizontal line of schematic dashes. the two shank and line are in move round struck through by a diagonal, recalling the harmonious proportions of a of gold section. A spray-painted fishing line snarls across the painting's surface. At the top of the painting Castrucci inscribed the phrase, "They installed the sapphirine lights so we can't diocese our veins." In these cryptic paintings, he objectifies the city's darker forces by the agency of giving them both form and name.

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