Pinocchio

(oil painting by Jaisini)

Reviewed by Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb

Jaisini, an artist of a new time and age, looks at the traditional art concerns of good and evil in a wider perspective. As we all know, this used to be a standard Biblical subject for the artist's exploration of the two sides of human nature.

In Pinocchio, Jaisini introduces the performance of late modern critical nature. It is a moralizing representation which is open to interpretation. Little in Jaisini's art is straightforward representation. Most elements are open to variety of interpretations, though a presence of devil in Pinocchio brings us closer to the original concern.

As we know, from the history of art, in the art works of medieval times, especially in the paintings of Bosch, devils appear among people during their ordinary working lives. It epitomized the medieval belief in the real unseen existence of demons and devils everywhere.

For Jaisini it may be a simplest message of the ever-present antagonist to the human corrupt nature. The pictorial language of the artist is based on his search for the unusual associations. Here, Jaisini has produced a remarkably dramatic evocation of a turmoil at the party table. The idea of Pinocchio may be the Bosch's type illustration of the body prevalence over spirit. Jaisini does not show tormenting but a more contemporary kind of punishment as a birth of a black child with a knife. His white mother is covered with table cum-stained cloth. When the true image of the childbirth is revealed, the shock tactic invades the space. The orgy itself, the table and under the table seem like a replay of a crime scene. The giving birth mother exposes the unattractive site of birth. Her privacy is violated as she is a participant of the table orgy it seems like some distant laughter echoed evilly in her attempt to give birth to that violent child with the knife that cannot yet kill but targets surrounding world with it's pirate like curve. In Pinocchio the gap between the hard, prosaic reality grows more and more and the dreamy flexireality may be able to reflex more truthfully contemporary life with it's complexity. No court of law yet defined the art guilty of such reflection of unwanted truth, mimicking the facts of physical world in connection of unlikely situations and less expected interpretations. In the Pinocchio the puppeteer behind the staged performance of the orgy is supposed to be the author of the painting, but is he? The artist seems to be a mediator of social sadistic fantasies who entered them through artistic mode on the canvas with almost childish frivolity but with serious impact. In his works the heroes are freed from the burden of the gendered flesh being puppets at the same table with people and creatures of superpower or animals. The works like Pinocchio, 911, Meat Grinder have some posttraumatic content of the world in a process of loosing emotional content with its murderous rage and maniac annoyance of speeded change.

The orgy which takes place at the table and under it could symbolize the notion of an 'absolute democracy.' To the artist that is satirical, cynical, and tragic all at the same time, 'the most shameless thing.' Jaisini shows a committee of three at the same festive table where two are absent. The ruler is introduced by the liar Pinocchio. The birds symbolize politicians whom artist saw as representatives of the evils inherent in the legal and political machinery.

By arranging the partitions of the bodies by the table cloth, which covers and opens bodies portions, Jaisini lends an erotic dimension to the somber, grisaille color of the painting. The effect of sobriety, the controlled orgy, not a temperamental and eager as in Hot Dog Party, but rather dead is achieved here. It seems that the table cloth demarcates two realities, which are not that different from each other, with the same signs of sinnery, evoking man's abstruse appetite for 'bad.'

The table cloth opens a view that an aphorism describes well: "the only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so."

Jaisini doesn't adopt both, reality or unreal. He allows his works to receive different interpretations and to continue offering a mystery. A super plasticity and integration in Jaisini's work sketch out a new cosmology with the senses translated into visual terms.

The 'table' composition in Pinocchio, Hot Dog Party, Barbie Q, and so on, creates a phenomenological experience of space. Some things are effective and eternally magnetic. Jaisini as an alchemist, searches for a philosopher's stone which can transmute base metals into gold. He canonizes the technique of his enclosed composition of a secluded line together with the continuous idea, almost a myth, a riddle, a fascinating concept, the artist creates a new reality, fully integrated, with its own laws and reasons for existence.

The choice of images like Pinocchio, which are grotesque, brings the image to a new universal meaning. The clowns and fools are the representatives of the carnival spirit in the everyday life. In the Bosch's "Ship of Fools' the scene is presided over by a jester fool, whose role is to satirize the morals and manners of the day. Fools posses the time-honored privilege to be other in this world, the right to be in life but not of it, the right to confuse, to tease, to act life as a comedy and to treat others as actors.

Jaisini's style is marked by theatrical whimsicalism. His use of fools in some works could hold the artist's hope for humanity, hope that life is not necessarily predetermined towards loss, failure, and catastrophe. To the contrary, the artists like Bosch believed that sins of humankind are endemic and that hell is our ultimate destiny.

Jaisini creates in a carnivalesque tone his Show Time, Talk Show, Hot Dog Party. Barbie Q, Lunch Time, Sinphony , etc., which reflects the current condition of historical development when life becomes a permanent mixed eruption of excitement, spectacle, happiness, joy, tragedy, loss, conflict, dilemma, terror, and death. Still, human destiny is conceived as open or at least as not finally tragic and not predetermined to failure, but can change and transform. The artist gets his impetus and irrepressible energy to create in sometimes carnivalesque tone, as a social critique, nonetheless serious for being theatrical, extravagant, and playful. Carnivalesque may remain an always dangerous supplement, chellenging destabilizing, revitalizing, pluralising single notions of true culture, true reason, true art.


[Back to Collector Times]
[Prev.] [Return to Reviews] [Disclaimer] [Next]


Review "Pinocchio" Oil Painting by Paul Jaisini

Text Copyright © New York, 2000 by Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb

All rights reserved

Send private comments to author at: Yustas61@aol.com