Wendell Castle
Bestride, 2002

Signature: Carved ‘Castle 02’
Material: Carved Maple chair frame, carved Jelutong pillow

“Bestride” exemplifies Wendell Castle’s use of trompe l’oeil to blur the boundaries between furniture and sculpture. The work presents the skeletal form of a chair tilted across a carved pillow, its apparent softness rendered entirely in jelutong, a Southeast Asian wood. Subtle depressions in the surface suggest the weight of the chair pressing into the cushion, heightening the tension between material and illusion.

Resisting clear categorization, “Bestride” functions less as conventional furniture than as a meditation on the chair as object, image, and idea. Through its deliberately unstable relationship between support, softness, and structure, Castle challenges expectations of function while expanding the sculptural possibilities of furniture.

Reflecting on his trompe l’oeil work, Castle noted: “I had thought the way to have my work recognized as art was to make my furniture look like sculpture, but it wasn’t until my sculpture looked like furniture that it was finally accepted as art” (‘Contemporary American Woodworkers’, Michael A. Stone, 1986, p. 120).