Caleb Weintraub: “Body English”

August 22, 2026 - November 29, 2026

McDonald Gallery

Artist Statement: What is Body English?

When it is out of our hands -- when we are no longer commanding the ball -- we lean after it. We ask it to behave. Our poses are like prayers. Our attitudes are full of superstition. We make attempts, without even realizing, to affect what is already underway. Our appearances, our movements, our postures are fixed expressions of how little we can control the outcomes and how desperate we are to sway them anyway.

Pigment goes where it goes. It has a kind of mind. Marks can be affirmed and built up, or ignored, or rejected and scraped down, or allowed to remain as they are. The paint goes on dripping, drying, or not drying at all. Paintings are not inert things. They have to be negotiated with. Coaxed, parried, dodged, indulged. They need room for confidence and dullness and play, and they need to allow for slippage so they do not get too settled. Paintings are inherently unstable.

The paintings here are crowded. Men on horseback or motorcycles signal loyalty and status through armor, insignia, and the colors of an allegiance. Lovers move through overgrown rooms, marking devotion through tattoos and embroidery and ornamentation of various kinds.
They may be attempting to domesticate nature, themselves, each other. Animals externalize what the figures are feeling. The spaces collapse and overgrow. They are theatrical and sometimes disastrous. Things seem always about to happen, or to have just happened, at the edge of the frame or past it.

The figures are not getting where they are pointed. They are mid-stride or post-stride. Some are falling or have fallen. Frozen.

They represent excitement and anticipation and doubt and despair.
And mostly they represent the performance of those things. Aspirations. This is body English.