Reviews: Anna Torma, Istvan Zsako, Balint Zsako and David Zsako at Projet Casa | Jim Hollyoak at McBride Contemporain | Oda Iselin Sønderland at Projet Pangée
There were three exhibitions focusing on the Torma-Zsako family in the city over the past month or so. One at Robert Poulin (Métamorphoses) that featured them heavily, one at Laroche/Joncas (1 famille, 4 artistes, 2 expositions), and this one at Projet Casa (Flowers, Warriors, Beasts, Hands: Divergences et réciprocité). Unsurprisingly, there was a fair amount of overlap between them. The Poulin and Casa shows were, however, the stronger. The Casa show displayed them at their most uneven and Istvan’s and David’s sculptures dominated. At Poulin it was Balint’s watercolours and Anna’s sewn works that overshadowed the others. The Casa show was very much a sculpture show and the Poulin show was a wall art one.
Le Devoir gave the broad strokes of the packaging:
Anna Torma is famous for her embroidered and sewn works, inspired by the means of expression traditionally associated with women. Torma uses this to refer in a fragmentary way to legends and fairytales in which fantastic characters exist in a modern world that suddenly becomes just as strange, almost archaic. She also says that she is inspired by Itsvan’s sculptures or the drawings that Balint or David made as children. Like other Hungarian sculptors, such as József Jakovits and Attila Mata, Istvan Zsako is known for his sculptures, which have links with prehistoric art or even what is known as ‘outsider’ art. At Projet Casa, we’ll be seeing examples of his Babylonian series, among others. Kirsty Bell, the curator for Projet Casa, talks about the connections between his work and the archetypes of which Carl Jung spoke. And there was a time when some writers saw Balint Zsako’s art as a reworking of traditional folk art motifs from what used to be known as Eastern Europe. As for David Zsako, the youngest of the family, his sculptures and photographs feature animals and plants, which also seem to be linked to a strange world.
The critic went on to stress conceptualizing family as “interconnection” rather than as a hierarchy, and the manner in which other connections were woven into the description implicated the vague role of various cultural formations in their work. This could be an invitation to discuss influence in a quite direct way, something which the artists frequently bring up in interviews. While there is a certain level of resemblance between some of the works, what ends up being stressed in their juxtaposition is more the variation between media.
As far as the matter of influence goes, it is not really addressed in the curation. The works in the three shows spanned several decades and were all slotted together, often seemingly more for the sake of size than anything else. As a result, it feels more like a ratatouille than a dissection of the interrelationship between four distinct bodies of work (or a “rhizome” as Le Devoir suggested). Such an impression is reinforced by the often awkward ways that Torma’s work, particularly her collaborations with her husband, sit in the Casa show.
In terms of content, they share a very broad sense of “mythical” (or folkloric, legendary) imagery, although this is hardly unique to them and is not enough to provide much of a connecting tissue since in them it only registers as an erotic or food-oriented hint of content.
Balint has long been insistent on the erotic content of his work, something that he has suggested may have come from exposure to his father’s sculptures. “In my own work I find that you make one drawing and then the second one follows from it, so it wasn’t a conscious decision-if anything it was more a desire for the figures to be timeless and have no clothes. Once there are no clothes it’s an easier access to sexual metaphors,” he told one interviewer.
Terming them mythical etc. is also rather misleading. Generally, theories of myth suggest that they are narratives that provide a framework for describing metaphysical concepts that ground existence in the world (or other worlds). As the artists would insist, the works are open-ended and it is entirely unclear what (if any) narrative sense they have, whether they depict actions of love, violence, violent love, loving violence, or whether those terms even really apply. This also disables their ability to function as metaphors. This applies most clearly to Balint’s concise and alluring watercolours in the Poulin show. What they are is suggestive, which is why they have a certain seductive quality that is simultaneously familiar but vague or mysterious. This extends to all the works in the shows.
Or, one could argue that if there is a myth, it is the myth of open-endedness, that what is stressed in their practices instead is a kind of concrete contingency of the careers of fragments and stereotypes and this is best expressed metaphorically in the various rags and scraps that are tied to the web formations of the heaping soft sculptures.
If Istvan’s work flirts with the suggestion of the generic image of Primitivism and its mythical forms, it does so in a way softened with a crude humour that makes them feel far closer to something like Rex the Runt than ancient sculpture. They look “prehistoric” in a particularly art-historical way, deprived of any functional value other than as décor or sight, and, like the rest of the work, unmoored from any significance other than as broadly erotic art items. There is something innocuous about this.
This kind of cute, folksy monstrosity was even more pronounced in Jim Hollyoak’s Gargantuan exhibition at McBride Contemporain. Working primarily in ink, graphite and watercolour on various types of paper in varying depths of grey, black and white, most of the pieces combine a richly worked-up textural field with figures.
The more non-figurative works, creating strange landscapes, are the most effective. The other imagery brings together hybridizing and imaginary animals with loosely inspired mythological referents. These tend to sacrifice the background to these figures that are rendered in a detailed caricature form. They also tend to have a pronounced erotic component, such as in Elasmotherium (Siberian Unicorn) and Communion.
The exhibition essay interprets the former as
a monster - a creature that actually existed during the Pleistocene epoch - lies dreaming in and of a spoof Biblical scene of two unicorns mating, thus missing the boat - Noah’s ark - bringing themselves to extinction. It isn’t clear what this beast’s fantasy precisely means for us, but the tragicomic sense it exudes, and commentary on romance, loneliness, and time’s massive scale and effects provides a fresh and bracing sense of artistic breakthrough.
A review in Esse took some pains to try and link this to various ecological concerns. However, even the reviewer ended up registering how ambivalent this all was, concluding, “It’s a message that acts as a harbinger of imminent environmental collapse while reminding people of the beauty that currently exists outside the bounds of conventional categorizations.”
Projecting mythical materials into a more contemporary setting, Oda Iselin Sønderland’s Breaking the Waves at Projet Pangée presents a series of watercolours inspired by the figure of Ophelia and Norwegian folklore. These are recast in primarily contemporary settings as the various, usually nude or dismembered figures emerge or sink from their environments (subways, parking lots, gardens etc.).
The accompanying text points out how
The unearthly quality of Sønderland’s work is a subtle horror, like a human body moving in reverse. Her solitary, doll-like characters are in a state of transformation. Spiritual talismans pervade these works, fingers pointing to the heavens, the foreboding church organ in Hjertet, the winged young girl in Soprano. Yet the strongest symbol of transformation is Sønderland’s use of water. Bodies of water serve as temples - liquid sanctuaries for meditation and renewal. When submerged, these subjects transcend their bodily containers.
The imagery recalls horror filtered through manga and various other styles. The rendering of the setting in highly detailed and cinematic compositions in softened hues and tight lines is remarkably effective, evoking on their own everything that seems alluded to in their figurative content. The human figures themselves, usually nude with blank mask-like bodies and faces with bloated elfin eyes, do more to detract from this than anything else.
As with all the other works discussed here, there is a strong resemblance to the kind of anti-modernist Modernism of a hundred years ago. This is all lightened, and not just by their familiarity. Although they are all flirting with the “strange,” it is a very familiar kind of strangeness, a sort of mild artistic incest joke that cannot commit to being too much, like the surprisingly lucrative contemporary pornography that only concentrates on sex between “step relations.” This sort of lukewarmness is exaggerated by the fact that a lot of the work in these shows looks like illustrations for a children’s book or animation, at least children’s books for more sophisticated parents.
This is not to suggest that this makes the works in these shows less serious or thoughtful, but it does mean they possess a rhetorical quality that is both suited to their very vague sense of the “mythical” not really as myth so much as elusive narrative with mythical accoutrements and to a kind of nostalgia, whether that is for childhood or the art of the past century, whether in Europe or the East (Balint’s watercolours are evocative of Indian erotic miniatures).