It’s high noon on Monday, August 3, and Daniel Saldaña is showing us his studio, which happens to be the back seat of his two-tone Ford F-150 pickup. He slides the driver’s seat forward, pitches a half-empty soda bottle into the front of the cab, and starts pulling out objects that are on their way to becoming one of his gilded sculptures. An old metal helmet with Mercury wings attached to it makes Current photographer Bryan Rindfuss sigh with regret (can we possibly ask Saldaña to pose for more photos in this heat?) A 1970s yellow banana skateboard is destined for a Velvet Underground tribute. Saldaña extracts a long chrome object that looks like a fossilized spine: It reminds him of a cocoon, and when he finds the right butterfly, he’ll take the pieces to local shops to be welded and electroplated.

“I’m never in a hurry,” he says. He’ll start on a sculpture and then set it aside until he finds the piece he needs to complete it. He combs flea markets, garage sales, friends’ garbage. “I don’t care if it has someone else’s name on it, if it has a copyright or a patent on it” he says. “Take it apart and change it. It’s your world, and you have to make it better.”

The results of all this scavenging and remaking will be on display in Blue Star’s Gallery Four Thursday, when Saldaña’s Electroism show opens: A rocking goat, a swinging Jesus, a fish afloat on a bed of coral, a commedia dell’arte mask with eye sockets that protrude like gun barrels and end in flowers, another heavy coral-like blob — all of them coated in nickel, chrome, or bronze, some of them oxidizing, others shining like King Tut’s mask.

Apologies to Emerson: If eyes were made for seeing, Daniel Saldaña’s flashy objects are their own excuse for being. They are not, however, conventionally beautiful. At once repulsive and irresistable, they’re a temptation to ignore the familiar gallery warning “Please Don’t Touch.” I want to grab these obnoxious objects and bite their gleaming growths, pull the amalgamations apart at the seams. I want to weigh them like fine gold, hang them around my neck, hold one while I sink to the bottom of a swimming pool and leave it there. I want to polish them, and throw them against the wall. Mostly, I want to possess them.

Saldaña completes his found-art sculptures by taking them to his collaborators at Prestige Metal Plating and issuing instructions: which metals to plate them with, how long to leave them in the tanks, how to buff them. You can electroplate just about anything, if you follow the right steps. Saldaña created one sculpture by welding a tiny tree to a miniature chair and growing a lumpy golden stalk for its seat. Finished, it glows so brightly that the camera lens can hardly focus on it, and the eye is forced away, only to seek that searing false sun again.

For the many artists who have spent the last three decades struggling with the tyranny of the object, who have worked to destroy and undermine it through physical negation and conceptualism, the 49-year-old Saldaña is a cheerful foil. “I don’t see that many bright, beautiful objects in San Antonio anymore; I have to go to a jewelry store,” Saldaña told me over the phone last week. “And so I started making [the sculptures] really really gaudy, really really big, and a little surrealist.”

Saldaña loves the glossy newness of Dura Brass plating — which produces a tacky, ultra-bright, yellow-gold finish — but he also loves tarnish and age. Twenty or so years ago, before he began working with electroplating, he was into “historical stuff,” and he’s famous among his friends for relieving them of their castoffs. Married to a pack rat? Invite Saldaña over while your partner’s away.

“I like to be the big show-off, and I like to be the ugly where-did-you-drag-that-from [guy] … I like that variation,” he says. “So I give you an idea of what you can start off as and what you can end with.”

That dual quality caught the attention of Rome Prize winner Franco Mondini-Ruiz when he returned to San Antonio from New York in 2007. Mondini-Ruiz promptly lobbied for Saldaña’s inclusion in a group show at Blue Star, and put his work in a Contemporary Art Month show he curated at Galería Ortiz that summer, where Saldaña’s sculptures were among the freshest and most arresting pieces.

“[Saldaña’s work] is both contemporary and baroque,” says Mondini-Ruiz. “It’s both high art and very low — all the things that I love.

“He has gone to the next place,” Mondini-Ruiz adds, by taking the elements of our local aesthetic — the rasquache practice of making something out of nothing and celebrating whatever you have at hand, our simultaneous pride of place and ambivalence about history — and “elevating them into totally beautiful gleaming objects.”

Saldaña’s sculptural medium, which covers scrap metal and detritus in costly surfaces (and leaves them to naturally corrode again slowly, over time) speaks to false appearances and the arbitrariness of assigned value — plenty for an art critic to chew on — but it’s the joyful celebration of objecthood that gives his creations their real power. They have an unabashed braggadocio quality. Unlike the self-conscious academic defensiveness that lingers in the air around so much contemporary work, Saldaña’s pieces loudly reclaim art’s most primitive justification: Look at me.

But Saldaña’s work also possesses a magical alchemical quality. He finds a thing and makes it into something else, and if he hangs onto it long enough, he usually remakes it: maybe has it re-plated with another finish, or saws off one graft to make room for another appendage. If you take home one of his pieces, you intervene in the creation by arresting that work’s development, capturing Saldaña’s restless mind in a transient moment. Once purchased, his sculptures become the trophies they ape.

They are also post-contemporary in another key way: They’re unmistakably narrative. Saldaña explains that one of the pieces in a 2009 Contemporary Art Month show is especially meaningful to him because he created it for a Day of the Dead Holocaust exhibition in Germany, which he planned to attend with Vaago Weiland and Lara Varela, the artists who produced the striking tepee installation at the Alamo for this year’s Luminaria festival. Saldaña didn’t make it to Germany, so eventually he took the sculpture — an urn with a trumpet mouth supported on the back of an eagle — which had been silver, and had it goldplated. He wanted it to be like a treasure rediscovered, like the lost and stolen Jewish art from World War II.

“I try to create these stories, these ideas around my pieces,” he says.

Saldaña didn’t study art in school, but he’s been making art since he was 3-and-a-half, when his father noticed his drawing skills. He learned to read blueprints and to weld at St. Philip’s College (“Once you can do that, you could build buildings,” he says), and he practiced a range of skills and mediums under the tutelage of local artists (a partial list includes pottery, glass, faux bois, oil-painting, and furniture-building). He knows his art antecedents and appreciates them. Lately he’s been trying to adapt electroplating to painting to create what he calls “Pollock paintings” on large panels.

“I love the way [Pollock] took something so simple and made it a beautiful work of art,” he says, then adds that he made a “discovery” a while back: He saw a drop cloth that a house painter had been using for 50 years. “It was the best Jackson Pollock I’d ever seen.”

When Saldaña says this, it doesn’t sound like an insult to Pollock, rather an appreciation of that artist’s unique ability to distill decades of man and nature’s happenstance creation onto the canvas in mere hours. A conversation with Saldaña is exciting and fun, free of art-world jargon, and filled with unexpected detours. In a 45-minute phone call that took place while he was waiting to have his truck’s oil changed, he reminded me that at the heart of good art is a great eye and a generosity of spirit: Art is a gift delivered unrequested and unimagined by its recipients.

Saldaña got into electroplating by accident, while running an errand for a friend whose family owns Simmang engraving. One day when he was dropping off a batch of badges for plating, he asked the guys at the shop to show him how it was done. There were tanks everywhere, and “They were making little objects of art that they were using as weights.”

Saldaña asked if he could take home some of the weights, and it wasn’t long before he returned with them in hand, ready for more plating. “Then they were experimenting with me,” Saldaña recalls. “Then I started finding objects that I liked, and then I started welding … and then I just started making stuff.“

Which isn’t to say that Saldaña’s art strategy isn’t premeditated. Creating beautiful objects would also give him options outside of the gallery system, he reasoned. “I wanted to be out in the window, out in the street.”

Mondini-Ruiz obliged, and placed Saldaña’s sculptures in the Museo Alameda’s gift shop when it opened. They didn’t sell well, probably due to the price (circa $250), so Saldaña took them back, gave away 150 of them, and “kept making bigger and bigger things.” And Saldaña did find a window on the street: Sloan Hall, the upscale home décor and gift shop located here and in Houston.

“He’s a really sweet, nice bear of a man who makes really wild stuff,” says Marcus Sloan. “It just looks different from everything else. … People are intrigued by it, and once they pick it up they’re really intrigued because it’s so damn heavy.”

The new, very polished David Shelton Gallery in Damien Watel’s Stone Oak restaurant development represents Saldaña at appropriately professional prices, but his work can also be found for free on the city streets. In May, Saldaña began creating playful, poetic rides by welding odds and ends to bike frames, and leaving them chained up in public spaces. The first drop, at the San Antonio Museum of Art, set off a mini tidal wave of adoration and envy — aided by photos and teasers on local art website emvergeoning.com: a trike fitted with an egg beater and old license plates, a bike with a small set of wings.

Like the electroplating, the bikes came about when Saldaña took advantage of an unexpected opportunity. He was visiting a guy from whom he buys antiques, and a bike caught his eye, so he bought it and took it to his welding shop. Then he found a door screen at another friend’s house and incorporated it. He found more bikes, added wings and horns. Keep your eyes peeled: Saldaña plans to continue leaving them around town. He locks them up, hides the keys under the seat — finders, keepers. “It’s a free piece of art to promote art bikes,” he says, “and to promote found art.”

For the Blue Star show, he’s enhanced an old penny-farthing frame, again with wings, a rake, a crane, and spurs. Viewers can have their picture taken on it for a small fee, and the proceeds will support a spring-break trip to Europe for the students in fellow artist Alex Rubio’s Art Smart mosaic program. Saldaña wants additional revenue from the bike photographs to go into a Blue Star-Saldaña fund, a general grant-making purse for artists’ projects.

Saldaña says he wants to make more “amusements” like the bikes, a sentiment that reflects his most formative childhood experiences, when his father used to take him to “work” with his grandfather at his uncle’s property on Mayfield road. “My Tío, he was like Sanford and Son,” says Saldaña. Young Daniel would disassemble the old tin toys his uncle salvaged, and remake them into new amusements. His father began distributing these to his friends, who would often pay Daniel with a couple of dollars, which Saldaña would spend on malts at the Malt House on Zarzamora. It was the beginning of a life of compulsive creation and fundamental rewards.

The night before we first spoke, Saldaña was at his friend and fellow artist Robert Wurzbach’s old family estate, where a recent sale of some of the land has resulted in an instant junk pile. He asked Wurzbach if he could play around in it, and before he left, he’d started to build an airplane out of a tree trunk, some tires, and a propeller. He’ll pick it up sometime this week, maybe, in his truck.

“I’m like a machine,” he says. “It works for me, and it makes a lot of people happy.”

blog comments powered by Disqus

San Antonio Current on Facebook