Ruben Castillo One-by-One, Flowing, 2025
Framed lithograph and color woodcut prints on inkjet-printed PhotoTex fabric
Variable dimensions
Presented by Uprise Art
In my work, I investigate images of intimacy, archival history, and the body to locate traces of queer contact. I am drawn to the slow pull of the quiet and mundane world of domesticity, particularly a world built through a relationship with someone (or something) else. Print media is at the core of my practice. I construct images using a variety of traditional and digitally manipulated methods to portray scenes or objects that evoke physical, emotional, or psychological responses. Starting with drawing or photography, I’m curious about how pictures metaphorically transform and mediate narratives around queer subjectivity.
My installation for Art on Paper, One-by-One, Flowing, highlights material qualities that can be perceived as tactile or felt, creating moments of sensual tenderness and fantasy. I’m interested in both human and non-human traces left in everyday ephemera. The installation consists of urgent and gestural mark-making, collaged wallpaper patterns, and arrangements alongside other textual artifacts. Documenting these minor moments and objects builds an archive of feelings, quietness, and suggestive closeness. Pillows, plants, wallpaper patterns, handwritten notes, clothing, and corners occupy these images as figures in a scene. Allowing these elements to collide implies a sense of archival discovery and emergent possibilities while reconsidering historical narratives associated with queer life. The installations of prints sprawl out, strung together as a medley, reflecting the messy shapes a life can take.
Ruben Castillo (b. 1990) is a Troy, New York-based artist whose work reflects on the relationship between intimacy and queerness, and how that manifests within everyday phenomena. Working in printmaking, drawing, sculpture, and installation, Ruben’s practice documents and preserves the ephemeral with imagery that builds an archive of sentimental feeling, quietness, and closeness as a means of acknowledging the past and proposing a future. His works, which depict images of places, rituals, or things shared between lovers, convey a hope to communicate and connect.