About David Gista by Thomas Masters

Our bodies are wired so that the impressions that we receive through the senses evoke emotional responses that in turn engender thoughts. Artists take that constant of the human condition and create arrangements of sense data through media that stimulate, intensify and concentrate subjective response: art is affect. David Gista is a painter that understands this truth, taking into account the entire dynamic of art as experience, from perception through emotion to reflection. Painters who stop at perception provide pleasing, provocative or disturbing aesthetic surfaces, and those who stop at emotion are generally conventional or idiosyncratic; painters who go all the way to thoughtful reflection offer their viewers a comprehensive experience.

For more than a decade I have closely observed Gista's Figurative Painting ; in particular the works that involve his endless explorations into books and libraries, the human figures that inhabit them and the many layers of meaning that they convey. It is clear to me that he loves books, reading and culture, and his affection for, and his understanding of the world and his place in it rely heavily on these three elements.

“Books have been present in my life as long as I remember, both as objects invading my daily space as well as sources of information and stories.
They have a stimulating role for my imagination, they encourage me to create the images that they describe without showing them.
The paintings of Libraries are in a way a metaphorical representation of my inner life: a single individual, sometimes contemplative, often erratic among this multitude of stories and the characters that constitute them. The theme allows me as well to question our relationship to knowledge and information, how do we acquire it, how do we transmit it?”
If we wish to truly understand the meaning of his work, we must also add the category of Film. There is often a reference, though subtle, to Films and the many great characters that appear in them.

In his most recent paintings, Gista leaves the library itself and instead focuses on stacks of books with human figures either resting on top of them or balancing them precariously on the their heads as they move through undefined space. The messages we gather from these is both direct and forceful ; a response, if you will, to the speed and development of the modern world, technology, and even social media. Perhaps the best example of this new and more urgent communication can be seen in the Painting, "The Right to be Lazy". A single figure reclines a top a large, almost monumental stack of books. He appears completely at ease and deeply involved in the book he is reading. There is no attempt to surround him in atmosphere or contextual background. The message is clear: We have the right to pursue knowledge; to slow down the speed of life and escape the endless pressure to perform in society. In fact, we have a right to pursue knowledge and information on our own terms.


In another painting, "The Artist", a single figure walks through undefined space; faint, stenciled numbers appear on the surface as well as random mark making from the canvas having once been a drop cloth in Gista's studio, balancing an enormous stack of colorful books on his head. The Figure has almost no detail other than the thick, black lines of his silhouette. Despite the enormity of his load, we do not feel any sense of what might otherwise be a precarious moment. Instead, the figure is centered and balanced, almost confident. We might conclude that the books are the very thing that gives him definition; the knowledge and information inside these tombs creates his personality, his character, his presence, and above all, his intelligence to move through the world.

Thomas Masters

 Necessary Riddles: The Art of David Gista by Diane Thodos

From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas
that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I was living through.

-Albert Camus The Stranger


Entering a room of paintings by David Gista can feel disarming at first, like finding you have walked onto a stage set where some unknown drama is being enacted. The strange sense of both distance and intimacy in his images draws us in like the participants of an unscripted film we are unknowingly participating in. Oblique compositions of abstractions and fragmented slices of life feel like fast frame images from a Jean Luc Godard movie, or a subliminally cut sequence from Alain Resnais’ film Last Year at Marienbad. There is something distinct about David Gista’s surreal poetry of mystery and disillusionment with modern life, a kind of equivalent to French Cinema Verite in painting, with his keen and often ironical vision of social and cultural reality that combines raw emotional undercurrents and psychic intensity just below the surface. The artist plays with signs and fragments culled from personal life and the mass media, disrupting a sense of continuous time and reassembling the parts with an unconscious synchronicity.
The theatrical and cinematic texture of Gista’s work is not surprising given his background in theater before becoming a painter. Gista states “I loved the team effort and the camaraderie but at one point I was more into introspection.” This is also apparent in the artist’s deliberate play between two contrary poles in his work, the sense of the tragic and the comic which often combine to express a dark, even absurdist sense of humor: “ That’s the whole point. I like the ambiguity because that makes a difference ... in how you can perceive life. I am fascinated by the relativity of emotions.” The cinematographic quality of his depictions of people and scenes relate to his fascination with film culture. The dramatic lighting and cropping of images in Film Noir and Westerns were early seminal influences in his life growing up in Paris. “My father would bring me two or three times a week [to the cinema]. We would discuss movies all the time.”
This film aesthetic merged with Gista’s interest in painting which belongs to the traditions of Dada, Pop Art and Surrealism. Francis Picabia is an important influence as a Dadaist forebear who synthesized a style of painting which used illustration, pop culture, and kitsch in a palimpsest overlay to create bizarre visual juxtapositions. This attitude was typical of the Dadaist practice of mixing individual stream of consciousness with the texture of modern life, and the equivalent of automatic writing which the Surrealist’s regularly practiced. Other important influences in Gista’s work are the paintings of David Salle and Eric Fischl from the 1980’s. Salle reinvigorated Picabia’s use of stylistic shift and metonymic image overlay with a cool, lugubrious sensibility that addressed American obsessions with pornography and commercial materialism. Eric Fischl’s work also dealt with estrangement, rendering his human subjects in banal suburban settings caught in salacious acts and rendered with a raw and seedy fleshiness. Gista takes from both of these artists, using an urban, cinematographic sense of image overlay with an improvisational and raw painterly handling of the human body, clothing, and face.
The Soul Bags are one of the artist’s most engaging artistic series, a counterpoint to his paintings of anonymous headless figures with gesticulating hands. The feeling of detachment and alienation in these earlier works is replaced by the confessional intimacy of dozens of faces, each painted in extreme close up on cloth canvas bags replicating lunch bags, grocery bags, and shopping bags of different sizes. Some faces in the “crowd” are recognizable politicians and cultural figures from Europe and America. The most arresting aspect of these works is the intensity of eye contact in each face that gives a group display of bags powerful psychological impact, as though each face were a silent witness to some unrevealed secret. The eyes are indeed the windows to each person’s soul, each confronting the viewer in a speechless gaze of silent witnessing. With this concept the artist’s theatrical skill is at it’s playful best, giving a sense that the bags are a stage or backdrop for the viewer’s personas to interact within and among. The idea came from the artist’s recollection of bags with candles lit inside them used by the Southwestern Indians to commemorate the spirits of dead ancestors. David Gista has transposed the idea of ancient primitive rite into a modern context, giving a simultaneous experience of individual intimacy and a contrary sense that human lives are as ephemeral, disposable, and mundane as the commercially functional bags which contain their modern “souls.” The Soul Bags give a sense of how temporal and arbitrary contemporary human existence has become, while also revealing the poignant fact that in spite of this each and every human soul remains an ineluctable, even unfathomable preserve of individual existence.
Gista’s many images are derived from photographic sources that exist in mass media, film, magazines, newspapers, and personal life. “I am really relating to my personal feeling about the world today ... you have the sense of extreme primitivism and extreme sophistication at the same time, and that’s also the way I feel about myself. Common history and personal history: that’s all I’m playing with.” David Gista’s work also bears some relation to the artist’s love of American Jazz and Blues music with it’s rough improvisational and subversive edge. His sense of the tragicomic is based on two major themes that are endemic to Western society: the cult of individuality and the oppressive and invasive presence of the commercial mass media: “This [situation] is crazy because these two opposite messages are spread at the same time.” Many of Gista’s images are about this unstable dynamic mix of human beings and invasive media elements, neither which are able to be completely reduced to the other. He sees contemporary life as a constant battle between machine and the human body: “The only hope you have today is your primitive side because, you know, it saves you. You exist as flesh and blood, you are not a machine. That is the issue of the 21st century.” In a similar parallel Gista sees the battle of biological and technological elements on people in the form of invasive viruses. Planes of abstract bit mapped blocks and lines “interrupt” his images like the degeneration of a computer image contaminated by a virus. Whether as a statement of political and social inter-human conflict, or a struggle against invasive mechanization and banalization, Gista uses “amputated images” to depict an unbreachable gap between opposites which he is continually trying to unite. It is this conceptual dilemma that creates the emotional tension in his works and is the source of it’s mystery and silence. The treatment of fragments like puzzle pieces, particularly of human faces in his Camouflage and Soul Bag series, heightens the impact of mystery. Like a semiotic detective story, the artist’s manner of composition seems to be saying that what cannot be totally revealed whole must remain shrouded as a fragment, and that the fragment is the only way to be true to the depth of the unrevealed. Truth can only exist on a non-logical intuitive level. Consciousness can only go so far and no more. Often this consciousness deals with time and history, as is evident in many of Gista’s paintings which focus on politics and historical events. Well known American and French politicians and historical figures often appear in these works with overripe faces satiated with power and reeking of hypocrisy. These paintings warn about the uses of propaganda in the media to manipulate public mass opinion and historical perspective. In the artist’s own words “Human stupidity is also a virus.”
Like French Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s capturing of the “Decisive Moment”, David Gista visually and emotionally attempts to use feelings and impressions by being in the contemporary modern moment, “to use the element that I have in front of my eyes.” This is why the use of “concept” in his art is different from American variants of conceptual art at its philosophical core. For Gista the human presence remains and does not completely capitulate to deadpan intellectual strategy: the decisive human “moment” is still held in it’s plastic suspension. Like Cartier-Bresson he sees the artist as a witness of society and history who has the capacity for intuitive penetration of the moment, where “Intuition is about observation.” His approach is a reminder of the kind of historical difference which can exist between the French and American treatment of deconstruction in postmodern art, a difference that is most distinctly marked by the intellectual tradition and influence of existentialism as an important antecedent to deconstructivist thought in French culture. Unlike American conceptual art strategies, Gista’s use of concept in his artistic vision lies in a direction that allows an open ended purpose, where lived experience and intuition jam the reductive analytic aspects of intellect: “I want to embrace a kind of open and changing possibility, to have the freedom to change.” Perhaps this is no where most apparent than his series dealing with memory, work which is concerned with the existence of historical revisionism and it’s attempt to erase and destroy the reality of memory and the past: “If you deny history then you want death ... memory is the only thing that keeps you and the people before you alive.”
Gista’s work reflects an intellectual consciousness which comes out of French culture in the way he witnesses the existence of human contradiction. The work breaths a strange a kind of poetry, sometimes brutal and oblique yet also capable of beauty and fragility through unexpected association and discovery. He addresses this poetic strangeness he perceives in outer human society and the inner human psyche, emphasizing that there are unknown quantities that exist in both worlds and whose mysteries reveal a certain existential point: “Some moments of your life are completely unconscious. In other moments you have too much consciousness. the bottom line is our mortality. I think that is what brings a sense of sadness into my work, the love of life. It’s something you can’t have forever.”


Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, Illinois.

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by Emilé Ferris

David Gista's works feature weeping backgrounds, waterfalls of paint and silhouetted, isolated figures, that are generally depicted as if they are walking away from the viewer.
“Many things attracted me to showing the backs of people, said the French painter in an interview with F Newsmagazine. “It relates to the ambivalence of invisible and visible, presence and absence, being here and going away. It is an intimate feeling, being here and not here.”
Gista, whose works have ranged from large politically-inspired pieces to intimate reflections on the obsolescence and fragility of memory (one series was painted entirely on outdated floppy discs), says that he has a problem with what he describes as “artistic narcissism.” “I see many artists pursuing a very narrow context instead of a universal context.”
With the series of paintings scheduled to be exhibited at the Thomas Masters Gallery, Gista becomes what he describes as a funambule, walking carefully between, among other things, that which is intensely personal and that which is universal in feeling. The word funambule, explains Gista, is French for “tightrope walker.” “This [term] applies to my life...the perfect balance is fragile. There is fragility in the moment. Keeping yourself upright…is a challenge because life is in motion. Even the stones erode.”
In speaking of the recent American tightrope walk with immigration, Gista, who immigrated to the United States six years ago, observes the differences between the issue in France and in the United States: “France’s situation, I feel, is different...it’s a post-colonial immigration which creates a lot of problems.” Gista relates that when post-war France was rebuilt, the former colonial workers were no longer necessary. “This created tensions for those who had no jobs and then the economy collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s, which meant that immigrants got laid off and generally didn't work for three generations. People got into criminal activity, ghettos developed and there was no chance to integrate.
“In America it’s more about imperialist integration,” says Gista, who likens America to the Rome of the modern world. “Integration happens here, although it is painful. America is created by immigration. We all come in one layer after the next layer. The fresher layer gets the harder time.”
Gista, who grew up in Paris, freely expresses his newfound love for Chicago, a town he says he finds difficult to be lost in, either emotionally or physically. “People talk to each other here. They say ‘Hey, how’re you doing?’ The first time I came here I was with a group and we got lost on the ‘L’ and this guy not only gave us directions, but he got on the train and rode with us to get us going the right way. He got off the train when he knew we were going to be all right. He went out of his way for us, for strangers.
“[It] feels okay for me to be an immigrant on the social level,” Gista confides. “The reason it can be hard or maybe even lonely is not about my status as an immigrant. It’s about roots. It’s about moving here later in life.”
Gista’s first meeting with an artist in Chicago was with SAIC alumus Ed Paschke, a painter with a reputation for generosity of spirit. “I asked him if he knew where I could get a studio and he said, ‘Yeah, next door.’” Gista learned many lessons from his ensuing friendship with Paschke. Gista credits the renowned Imagist for having a profound effect on his thinking, teaching him that “it’s OK to do what you want as an artist; you don’t have to have approval.” A dedicated advocate for other artists, the painter believes “that artists need other artists more than almost anyone or anything else.”
Gista still makes his work in the same large studio down the hall from Paschke’s space. “It was bizarre,” says David referring to the 2004 death of his friend. “It was very abrupt.”
In many of Gista’s paintings, the viewer experiences a sense of sadness. As is often the case for immigrants, the figures seem to have an uncertain relationship to the spaces they inhabit.
It’s no wonder that concepts of belonging are central to the paintings of Gista, whose parents were of different social backgrounds. Gista observes that in the more stratified French society the duality of his class status made him something of an outsider, never completely claimed by either side. Perhaps this is why his reflections on belonging are so intimately felt and so striking.
One senses after talking to Gista that he finds his most comfortable home in ideas. In many of Gista’s paintings, it is the deeper recesses within libraries that glow with the promise of revelation and connection. Towering bookshelves reference Gista’s inherited passion for books.
“For me books are really a presence. Books are a place. I’m living in or among them. I have an uncle who is a famous collector of valuable books. He lives among books in shelves so tall they are like skyscrapers. It affected me as a child, it was like a city of books.”
The fact that the shelves in Gista’s paintings dwarf the few patrons of the library points to the power the artist attributes to books. “You can’t define a library as an object. It’s a living, almost biological, thing. Written words let us create images. Images create words and sentences. There is transitivity created by books.”

In a number of Gista’s paintings the brightly painted spines of the volumes further signal to the viewer that contact with the books is of extreme value. They are painted as though they are sharp and hot, capable of excising useless ideas and infusing their subjects with new and vital ones.
Despite his love of ideas and dialogue, Gista doesn’t usually begin a painting with a preconceived concept. “I would rather play with the physical properties of paint and set the conceptualizing aside. I pretend that I don’t have a concept…and I find that I say more and it’s more subtle. Art is about mystery and you don’t want to kill away the part that you are awakening.... Some things are best left in the air.”
Gista recounts coming to an impasse with one of his paintings. In the painting, five figures with their backs all turned towards the viewer and with their hands lowered against their fronts, face a waterfall pictured in the background. To Gista, they seemed to be praying, but somehow that wasn’t quite right. When Thomas Masters, whom Gista describes as “a highly literate person,” came to David’s studio and saw the painting, the gallery owner was delighted. He thought that the five masculine figures were urinating into the waterfall. Masters encouraged Gista to call the painting “Peer Pressure,” a double entendre which pleased Gista.
“Americans are a playful people,” states Gista, who relates well to what he perceives as American lightheartedness and is himself open to encountering humor in unexpected ways.
The fluidly liminal environments of Gista’s paintings demand that his figures cultivate an equally limber balance, the kind required of any successful artist, immigrant, or tightrope walker.
Stranger in a Strange Land, new paintings by David Gista, are on view at Thomas Masters Gallery from May 5-26. Gista’s work is available online at www.thomasmastersgallery.com and www.dgista.com.

May 2006

LANDSCAPES OF IDENTITY


David Gista ‘s paintings confront the viewer with complex images that address the relationship between the individual and the group. He investigates the body- -clothed and nude, contemporary and historical- -and poses larger questions about the body politic.
Gista continues to explore the themes that constitute his earlier work: the nature of identity and how it is forged. Accordingly he focuses his incisive gaze on the fundamental questions of life and, inevitably, death. Adult life, Gista reminds us, is about work and struggle to balance it with pleasure, camaraderie, a sense of self. Integration and alienation are the twin themes that run throughout Gista’s art. The result is a series of paintings that propose unexpected, often whimsical juxtaposition even when the ostensible subject of the work is utterly serious.

Gista mixes genres and draws on his extensive image base from the history of art and from the contemporary world. He borrows and distills images from the popular press- -advertising, photojournalism, fashion magazines- - and transforms them to construct a world that is at once familiar and new. Gista has long employed this approach to developing his subjects. The images percolate in his imagination and take an entirely different form in the process of painting.

This new body of work marks a significant departure in the artist approach. Notably, the printed fabrics he used as canvases (since 1996) have been replaced by solid backgrounds, many of them vividly colored. It balances realism and abstraction by means of painterly and thematic tensions and harmonies.

His primary interest is in the figure, as it has been for many years, though he has embarked in a new direction. While his previous works focus on solitary figures or “duos”, many of the most recent paintings emphasis groups of men or women involved in a common activity, stance, or gesture. Gista synthesizes the traditional genres of French art to make paintings that are simultaneously landscapes, portraits and “peinture d’histoire”, large scale, multi-figural paintings that tell significant stories.

David Gista’s new paintings remind us, with ironic humor and insight, that the company we keep defines who we are.



Charlotte Eyerman august 2000