Bryan Castro

"...the new language is not external to the initial language...It is a painting or [ a drawing ]...a painting [ or a drawing ] with words...as if the words could now discharge their content..."

—He Stuttered, Gilles Deleuze

"...the stutter usefully atomizes language..."

—Disability Rhetoric, Jay Timothy Dolmage

"...make whiteness stutter..."

—A Poetics of Interruption: fugitive speech acts and the politics of noise, Andrew Brooks

D. D. D. D. is pleased to present to stutter / to atomize / to interrupt, a solo exhibition by Bryan Castro. This will be Castro’s first solo presentation with the gallery. Through painting, drawing, and writing, the artist explores the concept of language in the expanded field.

By broadening modalities, language—through words, letters, and numbers—serves as vital compositional element that shapes the space within Castro’s artworks. He experiments with the materiality of whiteness and blackness, disrupting their seemingly fluent continuity. By creating marks like "BBBBBBBRYAN" and "B" through handwriting and stenciling, as well as using diverse materials on various substrates to attend to the theme of stuttering, these materials take the shape of text-based marks or glyphs, often accompanied by symbolic imagery, such as water and mouths. Castro is also highly sensitive to the potency of the image. Art historical quotations are often wryly and vigorously rephrased, revealing the symbolic fragility that underlie the power of meaning often associated with the work he references.

In his works, a feverous dance of semiotics blend color, mark, and text to generate a network of multiple interpretations and contradictions. Through these strategies of text and image-making, Castro’s works act to render visually present the poetics of interruption.

Bryan Castro is an artist who utilizes a counter-text methodology in a multi-disciplinary practice, focusing on the concept of ‘Mediums Stuttered,’ which highlights words as a visual art medium. In 2017, he earned a BFA in Visual Arts, with a concentration in Media, from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and completed his MFA in Painting + Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2020. His artwork has been exhibited at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU, / (Slash Art) in San Francisco, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Fine Arts - Houston. His 2024 performance, “The A.B.C. of Mediums Stuttered,” is on the digital library of Cripple, a publishing initiative that supports the endeavors of disabled artists and designers. He was a Core Residency Program artist at the Glassel School of Art, and he was a Visiting Artist at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Additionally, he is part of the building committee for Space, a not-for-profit organization supporting people who stutter through arts, education, and advocacy.

He currently works in Orlando, Florida.