Baltazar Castillo: an artist with many dimensions

While Baltazar Castillo grew up in the Austin area, his parents originally settled in Wicker Park when they came to this country.

"For much of my practicing career, I did not go to school but last year I started at the School of the Art Institute," he explained. "I started as a writer. I wrote journals, fiction ... so much ...that I couldn't go back and take things out to present to a publisher. I couldn't do it, I didn't know how. So I started to do sculpture. Figurative work with plaster and things but it became too toxic, so I began painting.

"I lived in the Flat Iron Building for about ten years but I couldn't get into the community so I moved around the corner. I live upstairs of my studio. My work is now more conceptual."

One piece displayed at Built was "CWP-001 InVested In Painting." A work in progress, he used an economic model of investing in a portfolio to complete the piece. He sold shares during the show. Now, completely invested, he will finish this piece.

 

To show his writing skills, he has generously provided the following excerpt from The End of The 20th century 2011

...I remember this because someone had placed half a 'forty' in a window, on Milwaukee Avenue between the Shoe Bazaar and the dollar store.
And because next to the weathered sign that read 'everything must go' a merchant had placed a fat inflatable red arrow meant to indicate around the corner but that doubled back occasionally with the wind to flutter at a man in the shadows of a dollar store
It's a fine fall morning in 1999, months before the end of the 20th century and I'd been making my way to the Jewel Osco, when I paused to watch the Central Furniture salesman in his purple pimp suit pitch his rap to a young Puerto Rican couple - he of the instant credit man, the no money down dude, with zero payments until the year 2025' -he of this and that -he leaves the shade of the dollar store with a swagger and as he hikes his trousers to approach the young WestTown couple on welfare, I am reminded of Harvey Kietel's character 'Sport' in the movie Taxi driver- the part where 'Sport' pushes himself from where he's been standing, framing the doorway of the pimp hotel, to confront Travis Bickle.
I hear the sharp tap from his gold pinky ring as Mr Purple taps the furniture store window directing the young couples' attention towards the jumbo -plush- fuchsia- platform- shoe- chair
"Look here papi ...." he says "...yo pretty young thang lookin real good ass up on dis, eh?
"But Papi from where I stand he looks like he's going to go ballistic for even suggesting such a thing! His brown face with the tear tattooed near the eye tightens as if he's winced, as if he cant believe he's been approached with such disrespect on the avenue at mid morning. Puta Madre! he can hardly imagine his presciosa celestina, ass-up on the tip of a shoe...but the apparently he can and does and so he nods, he smiles, he wags a finger at Mr Purple and pulls La Preciosa Celestina away along Milwaukee avenue.
The windows are full of obnoxious decor, cheap shoes, inferior clothes, dollar store junk, and grafitti - love. The working stiffs, the cashier at the Jewel/Osco, the pizza delivery driver from Big Tonys, or any pretty Latina with an overweight kid in her arms that approaches the Central Furniture Store, those who will stop to look at a thing in a box or that IS a box, with a fan and the white fabric that leaps about like a flame when the thing is plugged in and say "ay Yoonior mira, two of these looking real elegant and shit at the crib....."

MILWAUKEE AV.- 2000

Peering thru dollar store windows at made in Korea figurines. The afternoon you offered the passersby a juicy fruit, THAT day baby a -was- it a Blockbuster night?
and the computer geek -in his orange fluorescent jumpsuit -on a cell phone- rips packets of sugar into his mocha latte
while the voice on the two way radio -did it say well whaddya tink of, course they're imported sweetie 10 - 4- a - little buddy where's that transistor radio of our youth...our fingers rolling on the ridges of a dial.

In a dollar store where a woman rifles thru various bins of junk, her fingers
fluttering like the wings of a hummingbird. Today, there are heaps of things inside aged plastic bags so cloudy you can hardly tell what they are. You have to look really close and in that blur of activity you can see her slip a porcelain puppy into a pocket followed by the contents of half a shelf of trinkets into a bag that's stamped Filenes basement

Things that are picked thru so quickly here
from where i stand a mop handle and mop head for a dollar seems too much to
ask for and i am no stickler believe me for bargains
a three-tier bin holding an array of colored masking tape
he rolls looking as if each were divvied up to make two rolls
with a hand saw
each roll - like -a -day -old -a -jelly bismark - selling for a dollar

but there are things lying outside on the street -a poem all tactic no skillAREYOUPREGNANTDIAL I 800 estoy jodida....scribbled scrawled sucked into the grating at the back of the bus.notice how the cloned roll doesn't resemble its other half but rather like a ball someone's scrunched up and tossed into the bin

i pick up a roll and find that the edges have congealed by the friction of the hot blade i try to peel a bright green roll but all i get are snippets stamped .99 and hardly any adhesive
just for the hell of it i call out to the clerk at the front for a price
its funny but i like to hear them say the exact same thing all along the avenue "one dolla -a -everything -one dolla- at the dollar- store.....
"i once painted a picture and added those very words, everything one dollar at the dollar store - sold for 3 thousand dollars..
mop - heads -a -clocks
time brocated in velvet with faces of the last supper....but.... There Are     Things Lying Outside On The Street - for little or next to nothing
a- there's - a panhandler on an immense styrofoam plate with a partly eaten sandwich and some change.
and - here -a-comes a plastic gallon of Ice Mountain water flung from a passing car bouncing and rolling against the window of the Mr. Furniture store, the one with the polka dot sofa display

but they use two - way radios now in the dollar store
when i ask - a voice summons for customer assistance
an employee arrives
he snatches the tape from my hand looks at it like its some sort of electronic gadget nervous and fidgety like everything around us is priceless and may break if i sneeze
what business of his is this
no i mean what dollar store department are JOO from beetch.. i extend to him a two dollar bill
his cheeks distend.
i can hardly tell what you are like anymore, like everything else here
what you look for in criteria or why the sales people are in pajamas

no i mean Junior is this looking good to you or whatsuddenly I feel priceless surrounded by junki have the sort of natural look of short attention spans that clerks often misinterpreted to mean that i require immediate attention.That's ok forget it i sayi try to walk away but he has a firm hold on me"Fifty-cents mister" he says "no- frickin' " way.. i say "uh- how -can -this- be -uh-fifty -cents at the Dollar Storeand -uh- who makes the rules around here anyway....

porcelain figures in the grand rococo style perched upon carriages pulled by teams of horses, doubling as lamps or lamp bases. A three-foot shade big as a wedding cake.

i used to watch you at street-side helping the panhandler to his feet
or placing the trash into the news box reserved for the Reader outside the parking lot of BIG TONYS i used to wonder - what's wrong with you
yet then on those days when you'd buy street wise i -uh- understood
but today...outside my head begins to ache
all of a sudden i can't remember what a fish looks like
or where hay comes from or what good it is.
and yesterday uh- yesterday i thought, for no particular reason
i thought ....UH- WANDA HONEY WHAT THE HELL....
i believe i saw you sitting naked on the toilet
smoking a cigarette
cross legged
and as i crossed milwaukee at wood street i thought you were Mexican
the same way someone looks familiar to you.
i don't know maybe it was you
maybe you are
maybe they are to you