“Welcome to my world.”
Gerald Saladyga sweeps his arm toward the 22 paintings hanging in a gallery at Waterbury’s Mattatuck Museum. We’ve come together in the final days of a solo show he earned as winner of the museum’s Mixmaster competition. The museum entitled the show, “The Universe of Gerald Saladyga.”
That term, “universe,” seems more apt than “world” because Saladyga’s paintings really are celestial in scale and scope.
Saladyga says he doesn’t paint his paintings; he “builds” them.
First, he lays a foundation of house paint from Home Depot. Yes, house paint. “It’s durable, the colors are great, and they’re easy to work with,” Saladyga tells me.
He then uses sandpaper, eroding and gradiating the foundation before Saladyga uses tiny pieces of tape to outline small details he then paints, inch by inch, working across canvases as tall as eight feet, as he erects fantastical scenes with a Byzantine flatness resembling South Park.
Like South Park, Saladyga’s world is twisted.
Amid the whimsy and fantastical elements, like Bigfoot and aliens, you see destruction: comets descend, homes stand in shadows of smog-spewing factories, human faces are frozen in shock, awe, and horror.
Saladyga spent hours as a child pouring over building plans and blueprints; the rest of the time he romped through the forest behind his home his mechanic father built in Stratford – until developers tore down the trees and blasted through rock to build shoddy plywood split-levels – an ecological destruction that informs the retired teacher’s work.
His constructionist landscapes are not “romantic representations of the past;” they’re reflections of the ways humans change the land with sprawl and pollution and war – our species’ entire history is embedded under our feet, ever present and ready to resurface.
Other topics Saladyga addresses include the Rwandan genocide and the Ukraine war.
“I try to make something destructive beautiful, because it draws you in: You see a little girl with a doll and flower dress; then you get closer and see her arms and legs are cut off.” It’s a visual Trojan Horse.
Saladyga’s isn’t trying to send viewers into a tailspin. “I want viewers to be delighted; yes, there’s still pollution, there’s still death, there’s bones being scooped up, but there’s also light and color and stars and there were even dinosaurs.
“They’re serious paintings, but there’s happiness there, too.”
That is a lesson Saladyga’s parents imparted early: embrace life even amid tragedy. “They said, ‘You have to get up and go to work every morning. And that’s what they did, and that’s what me and my brother and sister did, so I’m still working; At 80 years old, I’m still working.”
As we leave The Mattatuck, Saladyga stops. He turns to take in the room again, and nods: “This show was the first time I saw all my work together, and I said to myself, ‘Okay, Jerry, you did okay.”
Leave a Reply