Pablo Castoldi ” Lover Drawings”
Coinciding with the month of pride in the world, I exhibited my lover drawings for the first time in Buenos Aires.
At the end of 2021 my friend Victoria Colmegna invited me to join an exhibition in her space at the Kavanagh building in Buenos Aires to show my latest works of what I have been doing for a living for like 20 years – I help art directors present their sets for films and commercials. It is a very meticulous and demanding work due to realism and immediacy (drawings made by hand with a 0.5 technical pencil and painted with alcohol-based inks on A3 sheets), a work that (although it helped me to travel around the world and keep learning new things about drawing and architecture) completely eliminated the desire to draw anything else.
This year in Carnival when in Salvador Bahía (where I have been trying to establish myself since 2021) a mini accident left me unable to walk for 3 weeks.. to help me ,my boyfriend invited me to his place so in gratitude I tried to draw him . To my own surprise it was not easy at all – Used to draw 10cm human silhouettes for my concept boards – I tried a couple of times and I wasn’t happy with the result , so I found a 1 meter x 1 meter piece of paper and drew his face there on. It was like a portal, the jump to another scale allowed me to build his features like pieces of a building; and finally his gaze appeared on the wall.
In April I returned to Buenos Aires to spend two months with my parents and I told my mom that I wanted to try to do huge size drawings . One week later she showed up with a roll of paper 106 cm wide by 60 (!) meters long.
Assuming that I was going to have to show her the result, I started drawing a banana seller that I met in Freetown Sierra Leone in 2016, then continued with my friend’s baby boy who took me through Haiti in January 2020 and so on – but in reality I was dying to draw my lovers naked! So I asked her not to enter the little room in which I stayed. From that moment on – just as as if they were waiting – my past companions began to appear one by one.
The first was D, a policeman officer from Jamaica that I met originally in a club in Toronto and went to visit in Kingston in February of 2020. To make his nudity not the center of attention, I put two roosters on him, that gave me the idea of adding animals to help to define the personality of each one ..
The second was M, my current Bahian love! An English school teacher from the country side, a super funny party guy – obviously with a kitten! Meow!
Then R, my friend in Toronto, a giant from Pittsburgh, son of German emigrants – and feeding a young squirrel.
After several days in self-imposed isolation, I felt like letting Coca (the name of my mommy) in and sharing some art moments with her. Therefor I changed the set up a bit and put my my friend K, a heavyweight boxing champion from Africa and leader of the Kabadi team of Sierra Leone, and a devout Muslim, in Shorts. Of course he got a beautiful stubborn African goat on his side.
After him I drew Jackie Ludueña Koslovicht, my sister!
Bald with his Egiptian dog, who actually died in February 2020 just a few days after the premier of his great performance in the movie “La fiera y la fiesta” alongside Geraldine Chaplin.
From there on I locked myself up again to draw my sweet tooth friend from Sao Paolo – with a pig! And Luiz, my Recife city friend from the deep interior of Pernambuco province with a little field fox.
Gary Pimiento, Joe Bonomo and Pablo Castoldi
I was sharing this entire process with some friends who encouraged me to continue, mainly Gary Pimiento and Joe Bonomo. And as it turned out by favorable constellation that in those days Joe managed to buy an apartment to finally move away from his parents house – and not any flat, he founded an extraordinary place close to the Argentinian National Congress and beside the house where Marcel Duchamp lived in 1918. A book publisher had operated in the space, but the building was conceived as a fabric warehouse, so instead of an elevator it has a freight elevator for 15 people – and no neighbors. The cream-colored walls were peeling. While entered we immediately imagined a party with the drawings surrounding us, seeing those beings appearing in a space that had been closed for three years, an experience that could never be achieved in a conventional art gallery. We set a date for the next week.
In the days before the exhibition opening, I drew my friend Nadine from Munich with her little son and a Queen Brazilian ant; And once again my love M, this time with two catfish. For the last picture I chose my friend Stephan from Martinique, a crazy Shaman Yoga teacher with a Caribbean Python Snake.
Needless to say, the event was so much fun. And as a golden end without any of us excepting it, I sold a piece, a completely new experience for me.
I’m going to continue for sure! I have enough lovers in stock to complete the animals of the Chinese horoscope to begin with … And of course I hope to celebrate another great party, wherever, whenever.
