"Day at The Zoo" Painting

Doug Meyer, writer/painter/friend wrote To enter into the world of Claus Castenskiold is to invite a riotous assault of emotion into the security of our most personal space. His turbulent oil paintings confront the human condition, stuck as we are amidst miracles and disasters, ecstasy and despair. The allegoric nature of Castenskiold's art allows him to address universal human predicaments, yet these works are also intensely personal evocations of his own internal dialogues that range from the jocular to the despairing. Psychic torment, set against the paradox and absurdity of a collective paranoia, is a theme that runs through these paintings. Castenskiold captures this quality through the visual language of figuration and gesture, through his intense and highly expressive color, and even through his halos of fragmented pointillist brushstrokes, which give a dynamic energy to his compositions. In his visual scenarios the actions of the mind are made visible and are integrated into the "action" of his narratives. As in Rodin's The Thinker, the heroic human body is left paralyzed by the indecisive neutralizing forces of the brain. As Castenskiold's visual dramas unfold before us they reveal the omnipresent internal negotiations we carry out to deal with life's conundrums and deeper tragedies. Considering how deep he goes into the realms of the mind it is always entertaining to see how he can anchor these emotions to themes such as the whims of nature, the befuddlements of crossed cultures, and the mendacity of historical narrative that perpetuates our societal amnesia. Castenskiold marches out a parade of characters straddling the edge of hysteria, propelled by forces beyond their control. They are the unwitting inhabitants of a cartoonish purgatory that we observe through the window of his baroque compositions. We see what they cannot and that their suffering is not so different than our own The outside world is seen as through a filter, at once hallucination and clarification. The roots of this work reach back to the social protests of Hogarth and the nightmares of Goya. It is fueled by neo-expressionist angst, surre-alist fantasy and an optimism based upon the redemptive role of art in life. Redemption through self-awareness is not only a major theme in these paintings it is what has kept Castenskiold going through the uncertainties of his youth to the maturity that the recent work attests to.