"Chaleco Salvavidas at the Louvre" Drawing

Baltazar Castillo American b. 1953 My work is a mixed media assemblage of paint and torn paper. I use fashion magazine spreads as both collage and photographic transfer material. As source material, they determine color, content, and pattern. The transfer technique consists of acrylic mediums brushed onto pages and the pages pressed onto the canvas. With images absorbed onto the canvas, the distressed pages, sans images, are carefully peeled and applied to the canvas as collage elements. Sucked of their cultural content, in a washed out state, the distressed source pages, the transferred images merge to form abstract shapes. In the sifting stage that follows these shapes are pummeled back to recognizable landscapes or figurative interiors often using Paper Mache for bulk and mass.
I have developed and combined the uses of craft techniques, of paper Mache -with the traditional method of collage to cover the canvas surface in order to create unique supports. Simultaneously I have come to acknowledge the traditional use of collage as a process analogous to that of wallpapering interiors. I use the idea of a covered interior to recreate by relocating images and color from the page to the canvas, to draw and absorb from applied materials rather than to create imagined pictures on a blank canvas.
I see my work to be in transition, the transitional stage exists twofold; as a support for my covered interiors and as a papered vestibule for the artist's psyche. At present the idea of the canvas as a transitional support system provides me with ample room for experimental excess and accumulation - covering, ripping, pasting, sanding. I also see my work as transitioning from depicted interiors on canvas to large-scale installations as interiors. Installations as assembled arenas of composed materials, materials that are extracted, combined, expanded upon as both process and subject matter.

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