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 each of these "Endearment" works, Zakanitch floats the central, more formal painting within a broad border of what seems like a scratch area of sketches, filled with notes and funny things that just pop into his head. This is a kind of "working space" Zakanitch first employed in his Feet of Clay (1984) and further developed in some of the dog paintings. In works like Pig Blue (2004), the surrounding drawings done with graphite and blue ballpoint pen create a densely filled border. The pig floating in the middle of the canvas is, for all its formal energy, a quiet iconic center. Zakanitch's prankish free drawing and text around the perimeter create a space that leaks out beyond the edges of the canvas; this is the opposite of what a conventional frame does. Rather than separating the painting from real space, Zakanitch's "frame" tears open the pictorial space, uniting it with the space we ourselves occupy. This is a strange and wonderful effect. It is akin to the painted ceilings of Baroque churches that pull us up into heaven, except here we are pulled into the sweet, whimsical space of Zakanitch's rural idyll. With foreshortening and graduated shading, the drawings in Pig Blue imply three-dimensional form in space. They are less finished, yet they are also more realistic than the simplified silhouette. Incorporating ancillary views, words, sounds, fragments and visual puns, these doodles are Zakanitch's daydreams of pigdom, his way of elaborating the subject matter of the piece.

The linkage of feeling and form lies at the heart of the "Aggressive Endearment" series. To Zakanitch, late-modernist art theory, for painting at least, was an end game, an exclusionary program that amounted to the closing down of much of painting's potential. In his view, history is theory--it is the course of experiments and breakthroughs. And this history includes "low sources"--a whole range of the applied arts--things that lie halfway between high art and normal life. To him, the artist's role is to simply make art, sustain it, nurture its power as it sustains and nurtures us. Art does this by being tough (and hence "aggressive"), authentic and formally truthful, in the modernist sense--but also emotionally and viscerally truthful. This is the why of the "Endearments." It is also the why, in fact, of all Zakanitch's work over the last two and a half decades.

"Aggressive Endearments: The Silhouette Series" was on view at Spike Gallery in New York, Jan. 13-Mar 15, 2005.

John DeFazio is a writer, architect and assistant professor of art and architecture at Drexel University. He is currently writing a monograph on the work of Robert Rahway Zakanitch.

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