Austin Martin. White Familiar Dysphoria

About

Petzel is pleased to announce representation of artist Austin Martin White, with his first solo exhibition, Familiar Dysphoria, opening September 13th at Petzel’s Upper East Side location. In collaboration with Petzel, Derek Eller Gallery will simultaneously show an exhibition of White’s work, titled Lost in the Sauce, opening September 8th.

In addition to Petzel, White will continue to be represented Derek Eller Gallery (New York) and Capitain Petzel (Berlin).

Familiar Dysphoria + Lost in the Sauce

In eighteenth-century colonial Mexico, the ruling class of generational Spanish settlers sought to order identities in a way that reflected their interests and channeled the reality of mestizaje, or race mixing. They desired a hierarchy that organized Spaniards in a position over, first, mixed mestizos, then the Indigenous—who had been first slaughtered then subjugated, though legally speaking never enslaved—and at the bottom, Black people who had been enslaved. Through the application of the rudimentary science supported by European scholars—the eugenic fixers of the Enlightenment—as well as religious missionaries to the New World, the sistema de castas became a political and cultural rubric for classifying peoples by their relative proximity to or distance from whiteness.

The genre of casta painting emerged to illustrate and help codify such logic. Genteel figurative compositions generally featured scrolls of text across the surface of a painting, sometimes also the titles of the works themselves, to offer equations that must have seemed at least superficially factual to their audience: De español e india nace mestiza (From Spaniard and Indian a Mestiza is born), as the title to Buenaventura José Guiol’s ca. 1770–80 painting goes. Another work by an unknown artist, dated ca. 1780, went further in its didactic function by painting the numbers one, two, and three next to two adults and a child in the composition to ensure there could be no ambiguity regarding this system of identification nor its mathematical reasoning.

Austin Martin White’s research into casta painting is a foundation for his newest body of work. Rather than serving as proof of a conviction about origin the images he makes incorporate and dissociate from their sources. This approach has a personal valence for the artist, whose father recently discovered their lineage was less straightforward than previously known. The premise of belonging becomes a font of anxiety, while a hierarchy of subjects dissolves into layers of pigment, acrylic medium, and spray paint across different substrates, including a screened mesh of the type more often used in construction or athletic gear. One might naturally search for the eyes in a figure to try and identify with it, but the hardened nodules of White’s subjects tellingly fail to offer the reward of emotional insight when you meet their gaze, instead throwing the viewer back onto the paintings’ expansive fields of protrusions. Consider opacity maintained. A caste system, like the history of colonialization, becomes a backdrop in his paintings, just as it is the lurking backstory behind the way we live, or fail to live, today.

—Paige K. Bradley