Jerome Gastaldi: Bridges to Freedom
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A Californian born there in 1945, Gastaldi began the mixed-media Resurrection of Fear just after the second plane hit the World Trade Center; two thick black lines in his maze of colors and shapes suggest the planes’ trajectories, crossing large areas of the canvas before abruptly changing direction at points marked by red. While several figures seem imprisoned in the mess and thus stable, much of the rest of the composition plays at the boundary of chaos. Gastaldi borrowed one of these figures from Guernica, Picasso’s protest of an attack on civilians. A model biplane mounted on a faux Greek column in front of the painting mocks the supposed heroism of the 9/11 terrorist “martyrs” by pointing downward.
Another of Gastaldi’s subjects is the geographical and cultural border between the United States and Mexico. Working on his grandparents’ ranch as a child, Gastaldi often came into contact with migrant workers–one of his jobs was to bring them water–and today he sometimes encounters the border patrol on the way to his studio. La Linea/Migration North seems to revolve around movement of various kinds: a wheel protrudes from the canvas at the bottom, and in the upper left is a carved figure–a santo Gastaldi purchased in a junk shop–with a boat on its head. An American flag mounted above the canvas on a stretcher bar waves rather than droops, adding to the suggestion of movement; the first part of the title, “line” in Spanish, is the name Mexicans give to the border. The work as a whole suggests confusion, however, with its flimsy wheel and artificially supported flag, implicitly undercutting immigrants’ single-minded optimism. A video loop shot at the border, displayed on a nearby monitor, shows several people apparently living marginal lives: one woman with a child is begging.
That chaos made me think of Luis Trenker’s wonderful 1936 German film about the Gold Rush, The Emperor of California. It opens with a man persecuted for distributing pamphlets on religion in a claustrophobically cluttered Swiss city. Just when it seems there’s no escape, an angel appears and describes the wide-open spaces of the American west. The film suddenly opens up visually, showing the European dream of America as a vast, almost limitless land. Decades later Gastaldi pronounces an end to that dream: we’ve finally filled the continent with our presence.
