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

In Yellow Rose Squirrel (2004) the enormous, black-painted shape of the animal is set against the "drop-repeat" of the yellow cabbage rose pattern behind. The voluminous quality of the pattern elements intensifies the power of the silhouette and vice versa. Zakanitch endows the work with all the pictorial tension of high modernist painting--but with the provocatively unmodernist content of sweetness and sentimentality.

Zakanitch varies his technique, sometimes painting lyrically, sometimes crudely, with a near garish palette. He also varies the level of virtuosity within each work. In Squirrel Purple (2005) the underlying pattern moves from a flat, systematic, almost mechanical laying down of stenciling to open, free passages where the double-loaded and triple-loaded brush produces swirls that bring de Kooning to mind. Forms blur, drip and run. In this work, even the silhouettes are heavily edited--redrawn, rubbed off, overpainted and scraped down. All the surfaces, forms and colors work together interdependently.

Zakanitch started experimenting with these silhouettes in a series of watercolors three years ago while at the artists' retreat Soaring Gardens in northeastern Pennsylvania.

They just struck me as perfect, the silhouettes. I was there in this little farmhouse, and I was doing these patterns that had this kind of wallpaper look, just like the wallpaper that could be found in the surrounding country houses and I started putting these farm animal silhouettes on them ... and I thought, this is really strong, this is really powerful.

First depicting crows and then squirrels, Zakanitch drew upon the subject matter of his immediate surroundings. To him, the silhouettes were a perfect way to marry a radical pictorial form with direct and evocative emotional content: "Silhouettes are extremely sentimental. They were originally a cheap way of making a portrait, and you would send to your loved ones a likeness of yourself. What could be more wonderful, more romantic?"

Three of the crow watercolors appeared in the Spike Gallery show (Soaring Garden Crow Green, 2001; Soaring Garden Crow Yellow, 2004; and Soaring Garden Crow Coral, 2004). At 36 by 44 inches, they are very large for the medium. The acrylic paintings are, of course, even larger, but Zakanitch does not see them simply as monumental versions of the watercolors. He feels that his watercolors are "more like color staining than painting." A remarkable aspect of the "Endearments" series, however, is the way Zakanitch attains a similar effect of transparency and space in the opaque medium of acrylic.

"Aggressive Endearments" is in every way a series: five squirrels, three pigs and four hens populate the monumental paintings, each situated on a distinctive floral-pattern field. "The important thing ... is to have that repetition throughout," Zakanitch explains. Although each canvas works as a stand-alone painting, the reiteration of the same silhouette on the same size canvas creates a subset within the larger series. The pattern field that corresponds to each animal motif remains the same, but the colors shift. Gray Squirrel, Yellow Squirrel, Purple Squirrel, Pink ... Zakanitch works systematically with color, sometimes going for contrast, sometimes for barely perceptible shifts between high-key hues, elsewhere stressing sobriety. He even leaves a small "color-bar test-strip" on each canvas, letting you know what he is up to. Seen together in the gallery, the paintings produced the overall effect of an astonishing installation piece, as the repeating silhouettes established a dialogue of form from one canvas to the next.