In turns perplexing, disorienting, wondrous and utterly beguiling, Jacaeber Kastor’s drawings make you look, look again and then still more, trying to find your way in their miasmic magic until at last, well, you discover the special pleasure of being truly lost. And when you think you’re done, when you’ve decoded the esoteric and abstract, conjured all the forms and meanings from these oceans of latency, answered the call of otherness as if it were the sphinx’s riddle- turn the work or flip your head, around and around, because there is no single perspective to read Kastor’s psychedelic topography: it is an entwined and constantly unfolding omniverse that has no right side up or upside down. 

If, in the course of your wanderings through Kastor’s meandering poetics of line and space, you come across the unexpected, the oddly familiar or the impossibly alien- for indeed you surely will, quite possible all at once with overwhelming simultaneity- and you ask yourself how did you even come to get here, you might also ask how indeed did this artist arrive at just such a place himself. Make no mistake about it, Jacaeber Kastor is an intrepid voyager of body and mind, an adventurer without destination or designation, a man without return for even when he has somehow been there before he understands it as different, everything nuanced with the subtle shifts of imperceptible change, actuality always just beyond the tiny grasp of appearance, reason or replication. His art, like the convolutions of a restless mind guiding the inspired hand of uncertainty, is the tracings of a mind-traveler, a map to the nowhere that is everywhere, something so personally idiosyncratic that it marks a shared commons where likeness meets in a zone of compatible dissimilarity.

Growing up in Berkeley in the Sixties, son of an artist and art teacher from the abstract expressionist tradition whose legacy we might consider in Kastor’s penchant for the dissolving figuration into swirling abstractions, Kastor’s emerging vision further benefitted from a formative exposure to the ideas and sensibilities of the counterculture and drug culture around him. Add to this some years as a competitive skier in Squaw Valley, various physical labor jobs on both coasts including construction, house painting, plumbing and working in a ship yard, a stint studying at the venerable San Francisco Art Institute and a number of years practicing Buddhism and meditation at a Zen center, and you have the fecund ground for the flower garden of this artist’s fertile growth. All this life experience however is almost secondary to the informal but deep artistic training Kastor got when he decided that if he was going to have to support his art with a day job- a certainty because he realized early that his work was too slow and laborious as well as not so commercially minded to make a living at- he would do so by opening a gallery.