Carlos Pillado’s Via Vai Collection at Studio 44

Beloved local restaurant/living room Via Vai lost its Upper Village lease following a three-decade run. As the longtime crew tearily bade their homestead farewell, artist Carlos Pillado moved about the twilit rooms in a cloud of memory, carefully removing his art from the walls. “The day that I took down my paintings, I cried. That was a very sad day for me.” Backdrop to so many heartfelt gatherings at Via Vai over the years, Carlos’ paintings were now artifacts of an era very recently bygone. They – like the home they’d long inhabited – were going away. Evenings of lamplit laughter in the company of dear pals and family can seem happily unremarkable until business whimsy shuts a place down. The for-profit world can have a seeming life of its own, unanchored to the teeming actual life that is its sustenance. What’re you gonna do? “The landlord wanted the place back and he didn’t negotiate the fact that Pietro built a clientele there for 30 years,” Carlos says. “It’s a lifetime.” 

Like many an artist, Carlos Pillado wears a couple different guises. He is a longtime associate and onetime business partner of Via Vai and Pane e Vino owner Pietro Bernardi, with whom he has had a long culinary association. The Pane e Vino at 1715 Union St. in San Francisco was the center of Pillado’s working life for nearly thirty years until COVID shut the place down in August 2021. Carlos took the occasion to go home. “I moved back to Argentina temporarily to be with my parents. While there, Pietro asked me for help and l decided to move to Santa Barbara to help him. Home is Santa Barbara. When Pietro is traveling, mostly in Italy, I am in charge of Pane e Vino.” An emotional open book, Carlos’ eyes cloud now as he speaks. “Pietro did his best to keep most of the people from Via Vai, and that is amazing. I am very close to them. They are my family.”

Footloose Young Argentine Seeks and Finds 

Thanks to the usual kismet, Carlos Pillado’s so-named “Via Vai Collection” will be reappearing in a new upper village space, his mesmerizing art both subject and object when it reappears in the eccentric, beautifully appointed gallery Studio 44 which – as the rules of kismet dictate – is right across the street (1482 East Valley Road, Studio 44, to be exact) from the shuttered Via Vai. On Friday, October 11 from 5-7 pm, Stephanie Kaster’s gem of a gallery will host a reception for Carlos and his resuscitated Via Vai Collection. These things happen, thank goodness. 

Carlos’ search for meaning manifests in his art. His style is not recognizably of any “school” because he is self-taught and his images curated from his own color-filled cranial vault. The map to his own interior is comprised of these painted works. “I don’t decide anything,” he says definitively. “None of my process has any level of consciousness. There is no planning. Whatever happens, happens.” This alchemy of the id has thus far yielded the appropriate revelations. 

Raised by overworked parents, Pillado somewhat painfully found his way forward. “We lived in this small town and my mother had four kids and was a teacher in the countryside. My father was a workaholic.” Carlos’ solitude and interiority would later blossom as art, but at the time was crippling. Help arrived, along with the beginnings of a conscious Self. 

“When I started sharing time with my grandparents, for the first time I am being seen.” Pillado’s eyes glisten. “To them I was present. My grandparents were able to register that there was a kid in front of them, a kid that needed them desperately. They allowed me to be vulnerable. They allowed me to cry in front of them. They allowed me to share the most beautiful time with them. They protected me. They loved me. They believed in me.” Pillado’s variously solitary and loving upbringing would lead to years of emotional confusion and therapy. 

At 18 he entered the Argentine military and did his compulsory 14 months of service. “Then I joined the university and for five years all I did was school.” His major was political science, in which he took just enough interest to finish the program. His studies did, however, inform his first step away from things familiar and into a beckoning larger world. “My thesis was about Mexico’s political system,” he says, all but shrugging. “So I went to Mexico and stayed awhile. And then I came to the United States.” 

Cow Hollow Meets the Art Impulse

The rest of Carlos’ life – and the art that would be its guiding, unwavering flame – awaited his arrival with respectful patience. Once in the States, he made it to San Francisco, and we may imagine a starry-eyed young Argentine guy navigating the paved hills and glass skyscrapers with a suitcase in hand. This image is no more foolishly cinematic than what would soon actually come to pass.

“I started at San Francisco State University,” he says. “I got all the information and letters from professors, all the recommendations.” He responds levelly to my expectant expression. “It didn’t work out.” Here comes the rest of his life. “So I started working at Pane e Vino in San Francisco in 1991.”

The restaurant was located in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow neighborhood, coveted bastion of galleries, boutiques, and stylish, swinging eateries. Working his way up in classical aspirational fashion from busboy to businessman, over the decades Pillado made a life, becoming a partner to Pietro Bernardi in the Pane e Vino operation and gaining a sort of vast, loving, adoptive clan in the process, to which he would add his own dear Bay area family. “I got married and I have two kids. I worked with Sara for almost 20 years, and then the marriage ended. Through all this,” he says emphatically, “Pane e Vino was always something very stable in my life.”

In 2003 a corner was turned. It was a very consequential year for Pillado, a turbulent time whose details he won’t articulate. It was, tellingly, the year that pushed him to art. “I was not able to put into words what I was feeling at the time, but I found I was able to portray all that information with my art. Of course you feel isolated and the inner sense and feelings are very hard to share. But my kids grew up with paintings underneath their beds, on top of their closet, inside their closets. The house was always packed with paintings.” 

Pillado’s expressionist oeuvre grew, both therapeutically and aesthetically, leading him to a fuller understanding of self, and of a past that had been holding him back. “That kid, I didn’t like him. He was always suffering and always sad and always troubled and depressed. I didn’t like him at all. So one day I got to see him for who he was and what he went through. And it was amazing. There is so much information in that pain that you get to know yourself. That’s what my art means.” 

With the closure of Via Vai and relocation of his work to Studio 44, Carlos Pillado will be seeing his salvaged heart on display in Stephanie Kaster’s incomparable gallery, Studio 44. And we’ll see it, too. However much of Carlos’ thousands of brushstrokes manifested as healing over the years, the work itself is deeply affecting eye candy, honestly. Completely untrained and indebted to no one stylistically, Pillado’s work has the maximalist emotional pull of a Chagall or Klee – functional, complex joy from deep within a well of liberated color. Wounds are salved with such stuff, and we are the beneficiaries. Carlos sees it more plainly. 

“It’s just an experience, and it is there, and it’s for me. And I feel complete.”  

A Collection of paintings by Carlos Pillado – Exhibition and Reception
Friday, October 11, 5 – 7pm
Studio 44 – 1482 E. Valley Road
RSVP / Text Carlos: (805) 969-6939
Hosted by Stephanie Kaster

Carlos’ complete works can be found at carlospillado.com. He can be reached at:
carlospilladoart@gmail.com
310-801-2931