Bakou 14, 2026

Christian Gastaldi  

Christian Gastaldi is a painter who does not use paint. His pictorial material is the poverty of the common elements to which oblivion and neglect have conferred a humanity.

Like an archaeologist of the present, he collects damaged posters on the walls of the cities he travels through, from Europe to South America. These urban fragments, imbued with the collective memory of a territory, of an era, nourish his plastic vocabulary. Put together, they draw the sensitive cartography of a place, a singular topography.

Back in the studio, he works through gestures devoid of artifice. Working standing up, his brushstrokes are raw tears, handmade, occasionally revealing the stratification of the accumulated papers. He does not paint and yet his works are composed with the same rigor as a painter, particularly attentive to the spatial and chromatic organization of the elements.

But when moving from the street to the canvas, the poster changes its nature. Decontextualized, what remains of its message? If not perhaps the memory of the place, of what has been. It then becomes both trace and index. The perishable material is elevated to the rank of a sacred object.

Christian Gastaldi's abstract canvases evoke sometimes a painting, sometimes a plaster or a textile. From the material traces of a city, they bring forth a poetic abstraction that preserves the memory and identity of the territory. They make us shift from the immediacy of the event to the experience of duration, transforming a sensitive cartography of urban territories into pictorial language.