Michael ZwackMichael Zwack's paintings look like stone rubbings of, in four cases, landscapes, and in twelve others, portraits. The images seem to be conjured up, as if by some psychokinetic trick he was able to transfer them directly from memory to the paper surfaces. The slight off-focus gives them a mood of drugged evocation. The series called "Golden Warriors," are head portraits that seem to emerge from below the surface, the way a photo's image rises in the developer tray. The subjects are all members of different "primitive" societies and don't look very sociable. Their foreigness combined with the soft focus rendering of the image and its treatment with stain, transports us to an exotic realm, whether we imagine ourselves in the bush with our map lost or in a more comfortable adventurer's lodge complete with animal heads on the walls. These works confront the viewer and draw you into an atmosphere Rimbaud described, where the manners we've spent our lives cultivating so as to get by in society are suddenly found to be useless in a new environment whose inhabitants have dignity developed from heritage not facades. Viewing these works, our sense and placid place in the world are suddenly disordered as we're forced to surrender the crutch of being civilized; we're suddenly alone without a friend or guide. A few bronze heart sculptures (the muscle not the valentine) are also on view. These are less interesting as they are merely sculpted duplications of the real thing and though they might force a sense of our mortality, the rendering is ordinary so any inferences are totally up to the viewer. A floor piece of a corpse submerged in some engulfing material with a frame of sand is also less than moving as it seems to have been done for shock value and it's not horrible enough to be shocking. (Arts, November 1985) |