Switched-On Magazine

In the center of East Germany, surrounded by the remnants of a failed quest for world dominance grew up a man who would change forever the shape of Art and create a new modern medium of expression that will last far beyond his own death. Rarely seen and even more rarely interviewed, Seminal artist Bavaglio doesn�?'t paint in color and canvas, sculpt in rock and clay or draw in ink and charcoal. His tools are the spatula and griddle and his medium? The sweetest one of all.

Bavaglio is the childhood nickname of Gustav Gianni Leonardo Galland, born in 1965 in Wittenberg, East Germany, the unexpected fourth child of 43-year-old Amadora Castorelli and 44-year-old Heinrich Conrad Galland, sweethearts who met at the siege of Montecasino in 1944 over sausages and those little tiny cheese squares. I love those, by the way.

The son of a state-subsidized baker and a libertine mother, Bavaglio learned well the rich, dynamic interplay of yeast, flour and heat, putting them to expressive use in the absence if oil and pigment in his creatively moribund homeland. In 1981, at the precocious age of 16, Bav followed the beacon of Radio Free Europe, and with the help of an escaped slave named Jemima, rode the Untergrundeisenbahn under the Berlin Wall to sweet freedom - and creative immortality.

From the safety of this underground railroad, by way of an underground Taxi and a couple of quick underground Bike rides, Bav made his way to the underground airport. Frustrated by the illogic of the metaphor, he eventually went topside, hiding in the wheel well of a 727 bound for the port city of Hamburg, where he took a position in the galley of a potato freighter bound for New York. Six weeks later, arriving in the art capitol of the world at the pinnacle of social extravagance and cross-pollination, Bav found himself working alongside a dish-smashing iconoclast named Julian Schnabel in the hellish kitchen of a diner in Hell"s Kitchen known as the Hell's Kitchen Diner. From this lowly position, with no money for art school and barely enough for the Bisquik he lived on, Bav beheld Schnabel's rise to fame and resolved to do as he always had-use his spatula and griddle to serve the art world a dynamic new vision: one part Andy Warhol, one part Gerhard Richter and 100% Bavaglio Galland.

That much is known by a lot of people. Everything written above is outlined in Bavaglio's semi-official biography " Buttermilk Papers". We know who he is as a successful, powerful and sometimes pompous artist. What fewer people know about is his adventures with depression and his experiences learning to make sense of his art- both as a person and as a German person, which is very much like being a person, except with a foreign accent. A really thick one that makes you sound like someone from Hogan's Heroes a little bit.

Before Bavaglio was known and loved by millions, before he was adored by art critics and applauded by art magazines all over the world, he was a young man trying to learn what it meant to be an artist. Years, before, blueberry juice staining his hands in thick streams, almost like blood, Bavaglio sat in his Hell's Kitchen Loft, petrified, unable to move or even breathe. The sickly sweet smell of pancakes, his own work, rose all around him like the tendrils of a serpent, drawing him further and further in and yet taunting him all at the same time. His art was a release, but it was a hard one. A difficult birth. And at first, there was very little joy in his artistic expression. Almost as though the pain of creation and the hardships of living had to be purged from him through piece after piece, pancake after pancake.
When his first works hit the gallery, the world was less than enthusiastic. Driven by anger and hopelessness, in an attempt to drive our his own personal demons, Bavaglio showed a series of abstract blueberry- themed griddle pastries at an art gallery showing for upcoming young artists held in the Alphabet City Art and Breakfast center in New York. Torn and ravaged pancakes sat naked on the gallery�?'s cracked and decaying walls as testament to the pain that was filling Bavaglio more completely day by day- A pain that threatened to overwhelm him entirely. Like the sausage in a pigs-in-a-blanket, the pain at his core was hard to deny, hard, porklike and just a little spicy.

Critics tore at him, calling him a fraud and even chastised him for his craft. They claimed to be able to see subtle burn marks at the bottoms of his work, as though a careless baker left each for too long on the griddle. Today, critics look at those exact same pieces with awe and call out the fact that Bavaglio was making a point with his cooking style- a point that earlier critics were too unsophisticated to recognize. That we are all burned somehow- in one way or another, we are all left on some griddle just a moment longer than we want to be. We are all left in the hands of fate and the convenience of others for a little too long, cooking in our own pain for just a little too long.

It seems obvious to us now what was being said, what wonders of human truth were expressed with each fluffy pass of Bavaglio�?'s spatula, but at the time, there was no vision brought to his work by the world around him. There were no eyes that could see what he had to offer and no lips to sing his praises. No noses that could really smell the mastery and sublime excellence of his work and no fork to wrap itself around those delicious pancakes in joyful release. Mmmmm. Pancakes.

It wasn"t until he stepped into the Lyceum Crepe in Paris' artists sector to a wash of applause and adulation that it became clear to Bavaglio that his truths were shared by other people. That each time he brought his pouring bowl to a fresh hot griddle and let the anguish within him out against the greased and smoking surface, he wasn't just speaking for himself, but for thousands, maybe millions of other people, burnt a little at the bottom, speckled with the fruit of discord and doubt, shaped by the tools of an angry universe and smothered in the oppressive whipped cream butter and syrup of our daily lives. He learned that his pancakes were us, every one of us. And he learned to speak for us. By being brave enough to express himself, he became the voice of a generation.

What happens to an artist sometimes when they struggle to just live? Many people talk about a desire to express something that is so powerful it takes them over. Or a need to break things down and see the world differently. Or an all-powerful hatred of the way things are and a sense that the world is dull and colorless, painful and excruciating. Are these all the signs of the artist and do we miss them over and over again in our fast paced technology culture?

When we talk about Bavaglio, maybe we can talk about ourselves. Maybe we can look at the feelings that threaten to overwhelm us again and again, feelings that might need release. We can maybe see that powerful sense of boredom and anxiety and even sometimes the hopelessness that comes from being surrounded by ugliness and recognize what's in us. Recognizing the artist in ourselves is no easy trick- all critics are frauds. But when we find our inner artist and let him or her loose, how sweet are those moments of peace? Sweet like a pancake.

Peace and Pancakes.