Featured Artist Christian Gastaldi

Christian Gastaldi presents his fascinating portfolio of distressed posters recreated as new works of art. See more of his work by visiting his website.

 

 

I am a painter who takes colors from existing paper material, for whom brushstrokes are tears made in posters or magazines.

 

 

I was born in the south of France, in Sète, a city on the Mediterranean coast surrounded by salty waters. Its roots are like mine, multiple, mixture of French, Spanish and Italian. With the open sea as horizon, I had to leave. Since then, I have been living and working abroad and irremediably coming back. These unending departures and returns are feeding my creation.

 

 

What are you working on?

Since 2010, my work has been dominated by the usage of posters collected from illegal billposting places. I am irremediably attracted by the dimension of ‘humanity’ I perceived in this material. Posters represent moments of life, glued to the walls, then altered by the passing of time. In that way they acquire a particular beauty, rough and fragile at the same time, with lavish colors and specific textures.

I offer them an aesthetic ambition that they never had before; a sort of artistic redemption.

 

 

Letters are often present in your creations …

I love the writing, the aesthetic of letters. I am interested in their shapes and the relationship they develop in space. From an artistic point of view, their meaning does not interest me. I destroy systematically the original text. The creation has to be totally mine, the viewer should not be distracted. Letters regain a new life, broken up in a new rhythmic on the canvas.

 

 

What is your approach ?

I consider myself as a painter. I borrow the colors from distressed material (posters, magazine, newspapers, cement and rice bags). My brushstrokes are tears made in the paper material. I am attracted by the physical aspect of this type of creation.

 

 

My work is focused on the rhythm, on the internal organization of colored masses within the canvas. I seek the equilibrium that has the fragility of our existence.

 

 

I aim to create the equivalent of a style for a writer.

RedFox Press has published a book on my visual poetry work: “Poems from inaudible voices”. My canvas sizes are from tens of centimeters to multiple meters, like the work I was commissioned to do for a hotel in Barcelona on a wall of 2.4 x 7.5 m.

 

Christian  Gastaldi invites you to follow him on Facebook and Pinterest, and subscribe to his blog.