Stacey Calle was recently reminded of a photograph of himself as a child, sharing a bath with his brother pouring water on his head. It came to him not spontaneously, nor during a daydream. Instead, Facebook sent a notification: “You have a new memory.” Without the app, the memory might not have existed, the photo buried in the annals of a years-old digital album. Recently, Calle has been returning, he says, to memories, to their sensations and questionability, and to thinking about how technology and even time “reorganizes, reactivates, and subtly rewrites them.” These ideas are explored in a series of new oil paintings in Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling, a solo exhibition at David Castillo.

Calle was already curious about how we recall and digest our histories and surroundings; that all of it is both divine and quotidian is a chief concern of his multidisciplinary practice. After a year spent painting statues, replicas, and sculptures, or “humans rendered as objects,” he shares, was “craving the sensation of replicating ‘real’ skin, of seeing the image of ‘real’ skin again.” In a Ted Chiang’s short science fiction story of the same title as the exhibition, the author imagines a device that records the entirety of one’s life. Memories become retrievable on demand, proving, of course, that the way we remember is imperfect—recollections can be colored by nostalgia or misshapen by distance, considerably different from what actually took place. The artist was inspired by the book, drawing a comparison between that fictional device and the images we make— the memories we choose to capture—on our phones, enabling him to consider the real bodies in our photographs.

Over half the paintings in Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling feature people: a redheaded friend inflates a purple balloon; another peers downward, hair swept behind their ear. Stacey Calle worked from photographs for these images, though they were not always personal; our phone’s photo album, he states, “has become a notebook…a prosthetic memory. Photos of daily moments mix with photos of parking lots, receipts, recipes.” There’s a delicately distorted, fish-eye quality in even the most photorealistic of his paintings—hyper-real and altered, not unlike memories. “0:00 (1)” (2025) depicts the sky, breath-soft clouds above a hazy electric pole, the whole thing overlaid with a swath of green and purple and the scene’s corner cut out, an outline left in white. In “12:01” (2026), a grey-blue house is seen from above, the background mottled: static glitching into and out of view. They’re oneiric, particular details completely whited-out or dreamily blurred.

Speaking of dreams: Calle is also interested in the wakeful hallucinations of extreme tiredness, the hypnopompic state between sleep and consciousness. In “8:23” (2025), an oil-on-linen work, a gentle-faced person sleeps soundly, an arm stretched across a rumpled sheet, a beige negative space around their head. Memories, once revisited, can feel like dreams. The former most certainly happened, but the specifics are often hard to remember; with time, they transform. The latter is never as real as real life, but can feel even clearer. Sometimes, the two are mistaken for each other. Who among us hasn’t confused a dream with a memory, or woken from one that felt profoundly real, its attendant emotions stretching into the day? Appropriately, the childhood photo that Facebook resurfaced became a painting, also titled after Chiang’s story. Dreams are as factual as memories; memories are as potent as sleep.

Stacey Calle (b. 2000 Quito, Ecuador) lives and works in Los Angeles; he is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, performance, installation and photography. He graduated with a BFA from FIU in 2022 and received his MFA from Otis College of Art & Design (LA) in 2024. Calle develops conversations around history, identity, memory, figurative and landscape painting, daily rituals, Western ontology, and the human condition. He is interested in the digestion and fermentation of his quotidian surroundings and the cultural productions he has consumed throughout his life. Like his understanding of his diasporic self, his work is rooted in memories of his home and life in Ecuador, Miami, and Los Angeles and then tethered to a new experience of unfixed imagery and materiality that remains ever-changing. His current work explores the tension between the sacred, profane, divine, and the mundane. He has exhibited in LA, San Diego, Miami, and Mexico, and is included in the upcoming exhibition Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way at Buffalo AKG Art Museum, opening March 6th. The exhibition explores contemporary Latinx artists’ innovations and interventions within established traditions of painting, inviting discussion on a variety of themes and revealing the diversity and expansiveness present within the field.