JURE KASTELIC: CATHEDRAL AND BAZAAR

Carl Kostyál is delighted to present the second solo exhibition of Jure Kastelic (b. 1992, Slovenia, lives and works in Venice) with the gallery, ‘Cathedral and Bazaar’. The exhibition marks the artist’s debut in London.

May 2 – June 14, 2025

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 C.D.F’ (all works 2025), from the artist’s visually arresting new body of work. With the figure’s feet perched on a small island of rock and wearing such an implausibly louche hiking outfit (smart shirt and trousers, both rolled up, both darkened by shadow) the artist references Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic masterpiece ‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’ (c. 1818).

But if Friedrich’s figure apprehends the sublime Elbe Sandstone Mountains in Saxony and Bohemia which stretch out before him, Kastelic’s ‘Dipping Toes’ is locked in a gilded mise-en-abyme where there is no way out. Similar effects are realised in ‘Thrower’. In this disorientating composition, we encounter a reflection and not the actuality of a human figure, albeit one rendered in white marble statuary, while great paintings from the history of art–works which populate the walls of the room in which we find ourselves looking–are reflected upon the surface of the mirrors. These are pictures of a world where, despite all one’s fervent efforts toward action, purpose, and adventure, nothing changes. It is a bloody-minded world.

This predicament of being unable to fnd 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, in which his fgures might hold a thread taut to examine its length or use one to spin a gigantic wheel on the lonely sand foor of an amphitheatre, gestures to the Ancient Greek story of Ariadne and Theseus.

Many of Kastelic’s paintings are themselves caught at this juncture. They feel imbued with the symbols and the imagery of the past, but the narrative that underpins them could not feel more contemporary. In his pictures, we fnd ourselves in the minotaur’s labyrinth – and we cannot fnd our way out.