“Dark Paintings Redux ” Leedy-Voulkos Art Center
By Elizabeth Kirsch
Jim Sajovic created his “Dark Paintings,” eight of which now hang like specters in the closed Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, from 1991-95. They were the artist’s demonstrative response to images of horrendous oil fires in Kuwait during the gulf wars, and to civil wars in South Africa and elsewhere.
Pain and disaster fill the various picture planes, but their implication is ambiguous. “What Fresh Hell is This?” would be an equally apt title for this series, the perfect works for our present time. Like the best political art, Sajovic’s “Dark Paintings” have gained in resonance a generation later, their significance amenable to whatever our contemporary, overwhelmed psyches care to ascribe to them.
All the works comprise three large panels (however, only one panel of “Gates of Dis” appears in the show as the other two were too large to display). Sajovic mined a variety of visual sources for these pieces, distillations of which are juggled throughout the series. Included are images of a nude man in various contorted positions, fragments from Sandro Botticelli’s 15th-century illustrations of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” snippets from photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s series of a trapeze artist, and infrared heat scans of body parts and a speed skater.
These days, Sajovic is best known for paintings that are digitally sourced and manipulated. The “Dark Paintings” are visual precursors of his customary combinations of those techniques. While segments of these paintings resemble digitized photos, every inch in every work is hand-painted, which adds to their sustaining presence.
The overall sense of foreboding in the series is underscored by Sajovic’s deliberately intense, smoldering color schemes. In a recent interview, Sajovic said that “making the ‘Dark Paintings’ was a new adventure for me. I wanted just a few hues, a limited palette, so viewers could see the works ‘through a glass darkly.’”
He chose iridescent and interference paints in deep shades of cadmium, magenta, yellow and cobalt blue, whose compressed, shimmering juxtapositions enhance the sensation of being trapped in dank, heat-soaked environs. The small, chamber-like gallery in which the paintings are installed contributes to a feeling of claustrophobia. A visit from the Lord of the Underworld would not be a surprise here.
Most of Sajovic’s art before the “Dark Paintings” focused on the female body. For this series he wanted a “generic human form,” so he took multiple photographs of a nude African American model posed in a variety of postures on the floor. “I wanted to show the dark, anxious insides of human beings,” Sajovic said. X-ray images of hands and heads scattered among the works add to that effect.
Sajovic owns the photographs of Muybridge’s trapeze artist that he reproduces here. This series by the 19th-century, eccentric motion-study photographer hangs in the front hallway of the artist’s home. Sajovic chose specific images to copy because of the subject’s distorted body postures, which bring to mind scenes of torture.
Of particular interest are five paintings — “The Kiss,” “Baptism,” “Sleeping in Cocytus,” “Sisyphus’ Dream” and “Dante in Sarajevo,” — in which Sajovic incorporates choice imagery from Sandro Botticelli’s 1485-95 illustrations of Dante Alighieri’s narrative poem “Divine Comedy.” Written in the 14th century, the “Divine Comedy,” with its 100 cantos describing the three realms of the dead, is considered the greatest single example of European medieval literature. Still, Botticelli was criticized by Vasari, among others, for creating book illustrations in lieu of the major paintings for which he was renowned. Botticelli was obsessed with these drawings, which he never fully completed. (He made works for the Inferno and Purgatorio cantos, but none for the more uplifting Paradiso poems.)
Dante wrote the “Divine Comedy” while in exile from Florence, and Botticelli captured in exquisite detail the rage and condemnation that flood through segments of those cantos. Botticelli created the majority of his drawings using a metal stylus; Sajovic enlarged Botticelli’s images and used wooden ceramic tools to recreate them, scratching through layers of colored paint, sgraffito style. In “Baptism,” naked sinners are tossed head-first into baptismal fonts of fire, while sword-wielding demons abound in “Dante in Sarajevo.”
Sajovic calls the speed skater who pops in and out of the “Dark Paintings” a “cyber spirit; a nod to technology and also the soul.” The skater is also a time traveler, moving swiftly through multiple centuries yet ending up right where he started.
KC Studio April 3, 2020
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The Vortex Trinity, Todd Weiner Gallery
By Elisabeth Kirsch
Rarely does a group exhibition showcase an individual artist’s work to advantage. “The vortex trinity” is an exception. By installing new work by Hugh Merrill, Miguel Rivera and Jim Sajovic in one room, curator and gallery owner Todd Weiner highlights certain aesthetic themes these artists share, as well as underscoring their different sensibilities. A juicy visual chemistry pulsates throughout the space, while each man’s art pops in comparison to the others.’
Weiner originally planned to give each artist his own show. After visiting the studios of all three in one week, he discovered that major transformations were happening in each one’s art. He also found their current work shared some provocative thematic and aesthetic correlations.
All the paintings, prints and drawings in the exhibit possess a dynamic, even cosmic sense of energy, accentuated by layers of pentimento and lines of mapping. Although mostly abstract, there are geometric elements and/or vestiges of organic forms buried in all the artworks. A sense of history, past and future, pervades these pieces; for the viewer the experience is one of time traveling through each artist’s psyche, challenging as it may be to decode.
Miguel Rivera, originally from Mexico, is the chair of the Kansas City Art Institute’s print department and President of the Kansas City Artists Coalition. His work here is from the series, “The Origins of Idiosyncrasy,” and each print is a tour-de-force by a master printmaker. Rivera layers drawings of vectors with photos he’s manipulated, and then uses a laser to create gradations in each piece. His images include geometric forms superimposed over a Peruvian pigeon and the chicken pox virus. In his artist statement he says, “In my current work, I am visiting my recollection of events and structures that lead one’s daily life such as maps, the magic of belief in forces of physics and deep embedded images from baroque Mexican facades.” The series also reflects his experiences of traveling and sense of displacement.
Hugh Merrill is also a great printmaker, as well as a painter and community art activist. The untitled works on paper in this show are all meticulously constructed drawings. They possess Merrill’s usual intensity, along with multiple geometric shapes that seem to defy gravity, but there are new and notable differences here. Merrill has been dealing with throat cancer since 2016, and while working on this series he could not use his voice to speak. This latest body of work, which includes geometric forms left deliberately empty, is more ethereal, more harmonious and less combative in feeling than past works. They feel more spacious and softer, and are very compelling.
The biggest surprise in “vortex trinity” is delivered by veteran artist Jim Sajovic, now retired from the Kansas City Art Institute. Sajovic has been working with the figure for decades; his “Provisional Chaos” series, which debuts here, is almost entirely abstract. He has been experimenting with digital “painting” for a while now, and in these works, he selects images from a variety of artists, and then intuitively layers color over “images of cells, viruses, minerals, lunar maps, Hubble photographs, and facial closeups,” as his artist statement says, having “no idea what the appearance of the finished work will be.”
If Sajovic’s process sounds laborious, the end results are anything but. His new work sparkles with spontaneity as well as complete confidence. You can tell he’s having fun, and, as with all the artists in this fine exhibit, his art keeps getting better.
KC Studio May 2, 2017
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Jim Sajovic Raises A Blush At Todd Weiner Gallery
by Liz Cook
If an art exhibition can be said to have curb appeal, a drive past the Todd Weiner Gallery right now yields the visual equivalent of a hot pickup line. Jim Sajovic's new solo show, Hix Fragments & (pash'n), is hard to miss from the street. Explosive colors dazzle like fireworks through the gallery's glimmering glass windows. And that effect only intensifies once you've stepped into the gallery, where Sajovic's meditations on human expression and eroticism achieve hypnotic power.
Sajovic's digital paintings blur the line between electronic and physical brushwork, combining pigmented inks and old-fashioned acrylics. The paintings in his Hix Fragments series add text to that already complex aesthetic, overlaying images with lines clipped from the poetry of Sajovic's friend H.L. Hix. "Never in Control" stamps a fuzzy self-portrait with semitransparent text. The squat, angular lettering simultaneously softens the image and gives it texture, and the crisp turquoise dots separating each word help us parse the poetry.
"Sometimes Lie" offers a less straightforward presentation. Sajovic makes you work for the message — letter size and spacing vary within the verse, slowing down your eye as you scan the canvas. Some words are in the foreground, others blurred. The text's palette here appears more delicate than in Sajovic's other works, with lighter pinks and sea greens floating ethereally in front of the background image's deeper tones.
Two of the exhibition's most enthralling pieces share a title. "I may kill..." stretches the same haunting poetic fragment over paintings of two faces, one male and one female. The Todd Weiner Gallery presents the pieces together on one wall, highlighting the themes and tropes in conversation. Though each painting is a stand-alone marvel of emotional and visual depth, the interplay between the two adds yet another layer to Sajovic's work. The male painting presents the poetic fragments as a wide net of text, with the sans-serif letters and wide kerning of an eye doctor's chart. As in "Sometimes Lie," we have to concentrate for meaning to emerge — our more immediate focus remains on the man's expressive features and piercing, pool-blue eyes.
In the female iteration, the text is fully integrated in the scene: Words are swiped on the canvas as if on a steamed-up mirror, letting us glimpse the richer, more saturated colors behind the fog. The letters are scrawled unevenly across the surface, capturing the imperfection of an unsteady finger on glass. The humidity softens the woman's face, but her expression is no less haunting and alive than that of her male counterpart. Each of these subjects, the overlaid text says, could become "a razor in the night without warning."Across the gallery, (pash'n) throbs with an almost palpable eroticism. Couples, not individuals, are the focus here, and each painting in the series exposes an electric moment between two lovers. "Flicker," "Licker" and "Lip Nip" hang together on one wall, crafting visual harmony with interwoven colors. The vibrant, high-saturation inks meld and tug at the couple's faces, capturing them as if through an infrared camera. Heat blooms in Sajovic's unbridled palette: magentas, deep purples, fiery oranges and lipstick reds.
As in Hix Fragments, however, there's more to these paintings than what emerges at first blush. Sajovic's acrylic glaze adds a visual texture that you can appreciate only up close. Razor-thin lines of pale pink and green jet across the paintings like static on an old television. The hand-applied paint flecks the work with slight imperfections as it pools in the corners, making these pieces feel even more human and alive.
"Lip Nip" is intoxicating in its intimacy. The interplay of light and shadow emphasizes the natural curves and contours of a couple's faces, veiling everything but the essentials in dark romanticism.
In each (pash'n) piece, gender isn't immediately apparent; Sajovic allows us to imbue the scenes with our own histories and desires. "Flicker," for example, presents two faces in near mirror image, their features converging like molten metal into a pattern reminiscent of a Rorschach ink blot. Only the slight tilt of a face breaks the symmetry, allowing us to distinguish one from the other.
"Devour" dances more deliberately with this kind of ambiguity. Its commingling splashes of color make it nearly impossible to isolate individual features and faces. Shapes melt together, evolving into a permanent fusion of bodies and passions.
"Frenzy" and "Devour" are staged together on their own wall here, a presentation that brings into relief the subtle differences between (pash'n)'s component paintings. These two tweak the palette slightly, mixing dusky blues and greens in the top third of each canvas. That arrangement pulls the eye down to find the higher-saturation colors at each painting's base. We scan the canvases as we might look upon a mate, our eyes drawn toward colors and curves.
As seductive as (pash'n) is, Sajovic's exhibition is most alluring when taken in at once. The two halves sweep you into a deeply affecting current of intimacy, identity and desire.
The Pitch November 28 – December 4, 2013
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Words for troubled times
Exhibit features socially conscious works by Gobber, Leitch, and Sajovic.
By Alice Thorson
On the eve of its second anniversary, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art delivers on one of its most important promises with the new exhibit "Word, "featuring works by three mid-career Kansas City artists. Director Bruce Hartman has been a big supporter of Kansas City art, and for the last 15 years he has been steadily building what he intends to be a collection of record of art activity in the area. And from the first, his vision for the Nerman Museum included a gallery dedicated to Kansas City art. It has turned out to be a good call, as artists here are turning out dynamic and topical work that is the equal of anything being made in other large cities.
The idea of artists using language in their works is not a new one, but "Word" endows the practice with a sense of urgency. New works by Christopher Leitch, Archie Scott Gobber, and Jim Sajovic crackle with the tensions of a divided country in the midst of social and economic turmoil. "I think you really do feel the spirit of the times," Hartman said. "There's this ominous, disquieting aspect to all of it."
Gobber's piece, "Do Not Love”, lettered in the style of Robert Indiana's 1960s icon, reflects the present era's repudiation of that decade's come-together impulses. A large wall drawing by Christopher Leitch encodes the phrase "You are what you hate”. Two of Sajovic's new portrait-based paintings are overlaid with a chilling statement that begins: "I may kill." All of the artists in "Word" have had a good deal of local exposure. To keep things fresh, Hartman chose works that illuminate new or lesser-known aspects of their production or, in the case of Leitch's wall drawing, respond to new challenges. Gobber has a room of his own, hung with small-scale works on paper that pack a punch equal to that of his larger, better-known paintings.
Sajovic's new digital paintings, shown here for the first time, may be the best work of his career. Although he has used texts and digital technology before, these works, based on poems by a former Kansas City Art Institute faculty member, Harvey Hix, have an emotional resonance and social relevance that render them unforgettable. All are portraits of sorts, based on photographs that Sajovic manipulates on the computer, prints onto canvas and coats with dozens of layers of iridescent acrylic glaze. Sometimes he adds hand painting to the works.
The "I may kill" threat continues: "you should know this about me a razor in the night without warning”, and it appears as if written in the steam of a bathroom mirror. The words are superimposed on the portrait of a woman, whose resolute expression suggests she has had enough. The same text, written in small red capital letters, overlays a separate portrait of a man, whose liquid blue eyes seem to issue a plea, perhaps to save him from himself.
Three other portraits contribute to the ensemble's potent mix of desire, disappointment, troubled conscience, bad faith and feelings of powerlessness.
The image of a faceless man wearing a derby bears the words: "We regret to inform you that what we have to say is something you will not want to hear." The words ring hollow and insincere, as if mouthed by a customer service representative or a medical professional, conveying news that is routine for them but of great importance to the individual recipient. In a neighboring portrait, "You didn't listen”, the bad behavior described in the text is blamed on both the victim and the human nature of the perpetrators.
Taken together, the works offer a haunting portrait of a society in moral breakdown, in which individual urges and grievances leave little room for fellow feeling or commitment to the common good.
Words can wound, deceive and obscure and are woefully inadequate to convey the complexity of human feelings and ideas. These are just some of issues taken up by Leitch's drawings of words, rooted, he says, in grade school writing exercises that involved copying placards of cursive letters.
As a child he was also attracted to the individual peculiarities of his parents' handwriting, especially his mother's, which did not conform at all to the rules he learned in school.
As an artist Leitch has made a point of upending these old rules and inventing new ones, and the gnarly, illegible scrawls he displays in "Word" show the results. In a group of nine small drawings of single words, such as "now”, "view”, "present”, "memory”, Leitch formed some words with his right hand, others with his left. He wrote backward and forward and sometimes closed his eyes.
His non-logical and non-linear approach is deliberate, arising out of his equation of "illegibility with ineffability”. Visually, what the viewer ends up contending with are abstractions of crabby, meandering and interpenetrating lines, touched with small areas of color.
Leitch's large loopy wall drawing, "You Are What You Hate”, arcs and tumbles across the wall with refreshing insouciance, staking minimal claim to the space provided. As in the small works, he manipulates his selected words to the point of un-readability, in this case, hiding what amounts to a hidden truth.
Where Sajovic's sources are literary and Leitch's are philosophical, Gobber delves into the vernacular, borrowing from the conventions of signs. Two sketches of billboards -- one proclaiming "Abandon Hope”, the other confessing "I Yearn for a Happy Ending" -- bookend a barrage of hopeful and despairing messages. Letters spelling out "Dream" in red and black capital letters hover in the beams of criss-crossing spotlights. Another boasts "I Paid My Mortgage" in shimmering gold letters. Both speak to equally difficult challenges in these tough economic times, perhaps most aptly invoked by another work, which features the single word "Tired”.
Gobber is a master of the double entendre, as exemplified by a drawing of the letters "P" and "U”, which is titled "Up" but also suggests an expression of disgust. In "Palin'," he continues his sly engagement with politics -- here the apostrophe at the end turns the name into an expression of so much wishful thinking on the part of the former candidate's detractors.
Hartman has paired the "Word" show with "Light/Text”, a small, word-based exhibit by nationally prominent artist Hank Willis Thomas. The exhibit in the museum's new media gallery features three neon wall works, each featuring a series of words that flash on and off in sequences that yield different meanings and sentiments. The stacked words "This Is/My Best/Sell Your/Hard Time" yield a dizzying array of statements, including "Sell hard””, This is my best time," "This is hard." It's as if multiple speakers are commenting on the same topic from the diverging perspectives of say, an employer rallying a sales force, a Wall Street tycoon and a person who has lost his job and health insurance.
Willis is known for works addressing issues of race. Coinciding with a heated national debate on the topic, one piece features varying combinations of the words "off," "pitch," "white," "black" and the suffix "ness," yielding such combinations as "off whiteness" and "pitch blackness." Again, the individual's circumstances determine the values he or she attaches to these terms, highlighting the difficulties of reaching consensus on such a charged topic. All of these neon works -- a third piece flashes existential snippets from the phrase, "It's everywhere you want to be the life you were meant to live" -- turn on the push-pull between hard reality and dreams and desires, and the way these are colored by social, racial and economic factors.
For all the recent talk of hope, these have not turned out to be uplifting times. Leitch, Gobber, Sajovic, and Thomas look to the roots of the problem, focusing our attention on what's in the way.
The Kansas City Star Sunday, September 27, 2009