February 2025: Bushwick Art Gallery
Love and Heartbreak, a Duality

The Gift
“There are moments in life when you no longer recognize yourself. When the face in the mirror feels like a memory, when the edges of identity begin to blur. The Gift by Casale captures that quiet unraveling—the space between who we were, who we are, and who we might become.

The figure is whole, yet fractured. Their gaze is distant, almost vacant. Features—divided, softened, dissolving into the muted background. The rough, layered brushstrokes suggest something unfinished, something shifting beneath the surface. A self in transition. A self in question.

And then, there is the hand. Suspended. Reaching. Offering. But what is being given? What is being taken away? The gesture is ambiguous, caught between surrender and reclamation. Perhaps love itself is like this—an exchange that changes us, a transformation that leaves us both fuller and emptier than before.

Casale’s work speaks to memory, identity, and the fragile nature of selfhood. The dark, earthy palette feels lived-in, worn like an old photograph. Soft pinks and blues tracing the edges of the figure—faint reminders of warmth, of something slipping away but not yet lost.

What have you given in love? What have you lost? And in that loss, what part of yourself remains?”