Casey Bolding’s river on top of your head

Ocean, 2024, oil, plaster, and flashe on canvas, 26 3/4 x 30 3/4 inches

Casey Bolding calls this show “The river on top of your head,” the river being the way he’s been thinking about time and how it works on you, dictating how you navigate its spurs and crags, how it forms new paths and smooths out the old ones, how it wears down your edges, making you harder and softer at the same time. Everything erodes. Everything rushes downward.

Casey isn’t the first artist to be sensitive to this idea, of course. The Dutch were obsessed with it, plugging skulls into their genteel still-lifes of decomposing fruit, a not-so-veiled reminder that death waits for everyone. Casey has a bit of a lighter touch. His paintings resist bluntness, which is not the same as being aloof. They speak in a poetic register, limpid but not tidy. Faces are obscured, foreground and background are tough to parse, or maybe just open-ended. They’re less interested in narrative than memory, its diffuse shape, the way it tends to shift and Molt.

Scratcher, 2024 oil, acrylic and plaster on canvas 58 x 44 inches

Shepard, 2023, oil, plaster, and flashe on canvas 35 x 60 inches

Casey’s introduction to texture came while working with his uncle, applying wall treatments in the living rooms and kitchens of the Colorado suburbs — faux-distressed old-world simulacra circa early 2000s, when everyone was having their Tuscan villa moment. There was something unheimlich about those walls, even then, manipulating paint to tease out texture, glancing at a memory never experienced, cheating the river of time.

Going from treating walls to treating them as canvas seems a natural leap. People think about graffiti as a violation, but in Casey’s case the opposite is true. To write on a wall, like the dilapidated ones Casey encountered holding up falling-apart New York buildings, or a train, like the ones that would roll under the wide patches of rural Colorado sky, is an appreciation, a tenderness. A graffiti writer is always looking at surfaces, considering their flaws, how to reach an accord with them. But Casey accepts them on their own merits. Of the wall he’s about to paint, Casey thinks, What’s the least I could do to enhance it? To him they’re already beautiful without his intervention, because they already wear the traces of time.

Kin, 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas 34 x 44 inches

Thirteen Moons, 2023 oil, plaster, and flashe on canvas 51 x 41 inches

Nearly all of the paintings here employ plaster, and the ones that don’t seem to yearn to, the traditional artist materials — the oil or acrylic or flashe — assuming the matte finish of house paint. In a pair of paintings, each set into horizontal bands stratified like so many layers of earth and mantle and schist, you swear you can make out the lathe substrate — the superficial peeled back to reveal their years: previous coats of paint, built-up bad decisions, worse wallpapers, diversions and wrong turns. Casey paints in lyrical deterioration, a warmth in decay, seized for a Moment.

See The river on top of your head at Polina Berlin Gallery, New York til June 1st. Text excerpt from Max Lakin.