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Creature pleasures: "Aggressive Endearments," a series of animal silhouette paintings by Robert Rahway Zakanitch, presents fresh possibilities for combining high and low, formalist rigor and folksy charm
Art in America, May, 2005 by John Defazio
There is" something about these images ... these patterns, these funny silhouettes, that strikes me very deeply ... it is somehow very American. I know they can be found everywhere in the world ... but still, the idea of it is very American to me ... this repetition and variation--very practical, very systematic, agrarian ... it's democratizing in the small "d" sense. It is almost Pop, but without the nastiness. And it is kind of about where I am from--wallpapers and linoleum ... there is a horniness about them. It opens us up.
--Robert Rahway Zakanitch
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"CCCLUCK," announces the smudged graphite chicken peeking out from the corner of the 6 1/2-by-5 1/2 foot canvas of Hen Orange (2004)--just one of the joyous and luxuriant works in Robert Rahway Zakanitch's "Aggressive Endearments: The Silhouette Series," recently on view at Spike Gallery in New York City. "Peep, peep, peep," sing the little yellow hatchlings corralled by a pencil-line chickenwire fence. Two sunny-side-up eggs, plated and ready for the table, hint at the good fortune of these chicks that have escaped a similar fate. Smack dab in the middle of the canvas, an enormous silhouetted hen sits contently on her nest, framed by a field of radiant orange-on-orange floral stencils over a hot-pink background.
"Aawk," squawk the burnished-lead crows in Crow Orange (2005), fluttering wildly about with an agitated frenzy that recalls van Gogh's famous late painting. The center of the canvas is blocked by a formidable raven-black silhouette standing against a dense pattern of orange-red morning glories painted over an acidic yellow ground; the blossoms seem to glow like burning embers. Across the bottom, the word "CROW" is scrawled, partially obscured by the smoldering patterned field.
Silently, an immense silhouetted squirrel crouches on its haunches munching on a nut (Green Cameo Squirrel, 2004). He resides within an oval, wall-paperlike pattern of oak leaves and acorns edged with roughly drawn lacework. Depicted around the central image, sometimes realistically, sometimes cartoonishly, are the shenanigans of seemingly crazed squirrels.
"Oink," snort the graphite and colored-pencil piggies nuzzling among half-eaten corncobs and apple cores in another canvas, Pig Yellow (2004). A piglet in the upper left sniffs the air and a corpulent swine stands hog-proud in silhouette against a pattern of iridescent yellow and red hollyhocklike flowers. Above him, the letters P i G in a balloony hand-drawn font--a kind of "Piggy Sans Ultra Bold"--drift up to the top of the canvas, while a blue ribbon adorning the upper right-hand corner assures us that we are looking at a prizewinner.
Pigs and hens and crows and squirrels may seem like capricious subject matter for serious painting today, and these works are even more offbeat for their overt sentimentality and charm. "Barnyard Hijinx" was the original working title for these sumptuous and raucous new paintings, and it captures their sense of lighthearted revelry. Their absurdity completely disarms. These farmyard friends are neither metaphors nor anthropomorphic stand-ins. Antisophisticated and nonurban, they are folksy yet formally challenging. There is a naivete and strangeness about them, almost as if they were the works of an eccentric outsider artist who never made that big trip to the Big City. But Zakanitch is anything but a naif, or in any way an outsider. Underpinning all this tomfoolery is a postmodernist's play on the tenets of modernist formalism and the fervent exploration of just how the application of gloppy pigments onto a stretched cloth surface can evoke feelings of pure pleasure.
Zakanitch is one of the founding members of the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the mid-1970s that included Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff, Kim MacConnel, Brad Davis, Ned Smyth, Robert Kushner, Valerie Jaudon and others. Although Zakanitch was already recognized for the abstract Hard-Edge paintings he bad been making since the mid-1960s, by the early '70s he was beginning to find the effects of his own carefully color-graded canvases too hermetic. By 1975, he was working with "low motifs"--creating paintings based on sources as diverse as old wallpaper patterns, 1950s linoleum sample books and Czechoslovakian embroidery. To Zakanitch, these homespun and middlebrow source materials were "already beautiful in their own right," and their complexity opened up an alternative language that modernism had sought to quash. [See Carter Ratcliff's "The Politics of Ornamentation," A.i.A., Apr. '98.] Throughout the 1980s and '90s Zakanitch expanded his investigations of ornamental form to include objects such as vases, plates, figurines, architectural decoration and even jewelry. In 1992-93 he made five gigantic paintings collectively titled "Big Bungalow Suite," each canvas 30 feet wide and 11 feet high and densely packed with fields of floral ornamentation. In a catalogue essay that accompanied a show of these works at a temporary downtown space rented to accommodate them by Jason McCoy Gallery, critic Brooks Adams described the mammoth unstretched canvases as "colossal Intimist paintings ... causing one giddiness that touches on the sublime." The "Aggressive Endearments" series reintroduces such dazzling florid backgrounds into Zakanitch's work.
