Castel developed his visual language through urban interventions in his teenage years, painting intermittently and watching his peers on train lines while travelling around Australia. That early experience established an instinctive relationship with colour, scale, composition and mark-making that continues to underpin his practice today. He started showing his works in Sydney from 2011, including a solo exhibition at Arthouse and the Sydney Children's Hospital art program, and painted a commissioned wall at Play Bar. Since then the visual language took a backseat but continued to bubble in the background until now. His new series is what came back.

The work now is abstract, but it still carries his influences. Constructed geometric forms have loosened into organic shapes and fluid compositions. Negative space does as much work as the paint. He's been working bigger, and the paintings have a physical presence that doesn't survive a screen. Colour is where the past shows up most directly. His palettes come from the graphics, clothing, record sleeves and design of 80s and 90s hip-hop culture. Not quoted or reproduced, but pulled apart for the colour relationships underneath and rebuilt into something abstract.

The result sits somewhere between the walls he grew up watching and painting and the canvases he paints now. Energetic, but restrained. Castel works from a studio in Sydney, and takes on large-scale mural commissions.