Zuka at Darthea Speyer - Brief Article

Most of the news about cows these days is bad, but Zuka's visions of them provide a happy alternative. Zuka has been painting cows for about 10 years; firsthand observations of the white Charolais cattle around her summer home in Burgundy have been steadily transformed by her gift for fantasy, caricature and the folkloric. In her recent works the brushwork is broader and more expressionist, and the cows more intensely colorful--orange with green horns, for example, or magenta with yellow. They dwell in larger landscapes, likely to be red meadows patterned in tiers of blue, turquoise, violet and lime green. In purely formal terms, these paintings are sophisticated arrangements of color and shape in the tradition of the Fauves, particularly Vlaminck with his wild facture. They also owe a debt to the artist's Russian forebears, bold Goncharova and dreamy Chagall.

Zuka's subject recalls medieval calendar pictures, which typically include farm animals in the familiar round of seasonal activities. The subtext promises that everything takes its proper place in nature's grand cycle, and all is right with the world. Incredibly, this stable, rural world still exists two hours south of Paris in the village of St. Brancher, where small farms lie on the hillsides, and cows drowse and forage. Zuka refashions the timeless subject into a contemporary painter's dream of color and movement suffused with a satirist's wit. Some of her compositions wryly refer to the religious significance underlying medieval domestic landscapes: in Sunset at St. Brancher, golden clouds of glory over the herd suggest a Transfiguration or Assumption; in Angelus, the cows seem mildly attentive to a bell in the church tower; in the crechelike Dinner Hour, multicolored cows crowd around an iconic hay bale in a shed. These images suggest the pretensions of humans, of course, who have granted cows a role in our drama. Cows are hardly pious, and they have their own rituals.

Nevertheless, in The Hale-Bopp Comet, Zuka finds a connection between heaven and earth, between cosmic phenomena and lowly cow life that seems perfectly just. The sky is an energetically brushed jubilation of blobby stars, comet showers and Hale-Bopp itself. Below, the earthy, companionable animals lie, some sleeping, others alert. Neither alarmed nor amazed, they peaceably coexist with other forms of nature, like cows in Paradise.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group