jim sajovic studio

These paintings have morphed a bit from the Energy Fields paintings.  Seems like they’re more narrowly focused and more inward, as if the mind had a darker place.  Are they in a tiny, microscopic space or are they cosmic?  Whichever, energy and motion persist. 

are about optical patterning and the force of color, effecting a multiplex of neural impulses and associations in a synaptic buzz, while suggesting pulsations, flow, waves, instabilities, or fields of energy, in a space hovering between the concrete and the atmospheric, or perhaps, as a landscape seen under a microscope. I often start with a field of simple marks, textures, or microscopic elements, which I then manipulate, stretch, break apart, or overlay in a search for a palpable identity. What may emerge from multiple layers built up in this way gives me a chance to discover, rather than determine, an outcome.  I am interested in how one’s visual brain interprets conflicting patterns.  How does the eye move?  How does the mind see focal resolution, transparency, opacity, or space?  How does something appear to emerge and then submerge again?  How do static shapes of color seem energized, flowing or vibrating?  I take great delight in the emergence of a complex field that I could not have predicted in advance.

These images are realized through artifice and simulation. 

They use digital technology to cut an edge between reference and reality, reality being the marks or signs that are the ordinary language of computer imaging.   

With a nod to Raphael Rubenstein’s notion of Provisional Painting, I have referenced the work of “artists who have long made works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling”, by layering low resolution, highly deconstructed images of selected examples of their works, with other images from diverse sources, including microphotographs of cells, viruses, minerals, lunar maps, Hubble photographs, facial close-ups, and others.  My aim is to effect an illusion of chaos through intricacy, complication, and contradiction. 

Although these works do not follow a specific narrative, they are ripe with associative meanings, drawn from contemporary culture, desire, conflict, and art-critical discourse.  They are open fields within which the viewer can play, roam, or romp with the pleasure of discovery. 

(pash’n): in the moment, hungry, famished, devouring, burning, smoldering, fire, fieriness, vigor, energy, animation, spirit, spiritedness, fervor, ardor, enthusiasm, eagerness, zeal, zealousness, fanaticism, (blind) rage, fit of anger/temper, tantrum, fury, frenzy, love, (sexual) desire, lust, rapture, infatuation, lasciviousness, lustfulness, fascination, obsession, fixation, compulsion, appetite, addiction, preoccupation, craze, mania.  

What fires and which colors are burning inside? 

A person, unlike a painting, lives in a multiplicity of moments.  Identity is bound up in history, aspirations, and chance.  

“Hix Fragments” are derived from the poetry of my friend and former colleague, H. L. (Harvey) Hix.  These paintings focus on the many thoughts, fears, and aspirations that make up the private, and often unspoken, reality of consciousness. I have tried to capture a subtlety of facial expression, overlaid with fields of text, in an attempt to convey thoughts and feelings, sometimes spoken, sometimes suppressed, that lie at a threshold we are often reluctant to cross, whether from embarrassment or fear.  I have enhanced the color, focus, and surface effects so that the image throbs and vibrates with an aliveness I hope might enchant and seduce the viewer to decipher the text.  

These are “dreamers”…ecstatic, rapturous…floating in amniotic bliss…Nirvana.  They are in motion, rotation…another space you enter through veils of iridescent glaze. 

How to picture transcendent consciousness?  To picture a transcendent state of consciousness with visual imagery suggests the establishment of a space without sculptural form, weight, distance, or time.  This space must be mutable and, contrary to ordinary experience, both flat and limitless.  For me, it is a color space, color being a substance, like air or like water, that becomes a kind of medium within which thought can exist, within which consciousness moves. 

In her catalogue essay for my 2005 exhibition at the Daum Museum, Leesa Fanning speaks of Jouissance:  “Jouissance, describes a state of ecstasy, and the multiple meanings are simultaneous—jouissance is at once sexual, spiritual, physical, and conceptual.[i]  According to Julia Kristeva, a literary and cultural theorist, linguist, and psychoanalyst, the primary vehicle of jouissance is color.  Color ravishes the eye, eroticizes the body, and returns us to fleeting moments of our origins.” 

I have, for a number of years, been using the luminous potential of iridescent pigments to induce shifting perceptions of space and color.  I have been striving to create a sort of “color atmosphere” within which form can emerge or dissolve in the mind of the viewer. 

I am interested in optics, how the eye and brain perceive and then construct meaning.  I am interested in the subversive complexity of an art that changes as the viewer moves, that ripens as successive moments accumulate, an art that rewards the patient viewer.

Millennium Garden, with its three, large panels, “Eden”, “Paradise”, and “Darkness”, is the central element of a body of work first exhibited at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, in St. Joseph, Missouri.  The relationship between Millennium Garden and The Garden of Earthly Delights is one of inspiration and response; it is poetic rather than literal.  The visual quotations from the Bosch triptych are “markers” intended to suggest historical and psychological linkages with contemporary experience.  This work focuses on the human body, male and female, as an archetypal representation of the self in moments of awakening, becoming, transcendence, and loss. 

These works have evolved in relation to a central principle: that the painting is not to be understood as a static object; rather, it is to be experienced as a viewer-interactive, light-responsive phenomenon.  Because they are light-reactive, they are greatly dependent upon their installation.  For the same reason, they are not well-understood in mechanical reproduction.  What may not be clear from the illustrations is the elusive, non-static character of these paintings.  The sense of space is illusionistic and optical, atmospheric and ambiguous.  They are constructed of translucent layers of color with iridescent pigments and glazes.  As the viewer moves from left to right, closer or farther away, the character of the color changes: copper becomes vermilion, green becomes red; the layers invert; drawn elements emerge, then fade.

The Dark Paintings began with media images of the oil fires in Kuwait.  Burning plumes against the blackened sky kindled my interest in re-reading Dante. They were intuitive responses to poetic fragments from Inferno, especially Canto VIII, in which Dante and Virgil first see the fiery towers of the city of Dis glowing in the murky darkness.  As I went deeper into the text of the Inferno, I was struck by many relationships to contemporary experience.  This was my entree into darkness, becoming more inward and more intimate as the work evolved.  My intention was not to construct a clear narrative line, but to let a series of poetic fragments play in the imagination. 

These works have been described as “painful images of destruction and torture”, “both psychologically disturbing and intriguing”; as offering “fleeting glimpses of man’s destructive inclinations, while ephemeral reminders of subliminal darkness and inner withdrawal bleed through”. 

“Motion Pictures appropriate the cinematic, slow motion blur; a hallucinatory device potentially rich in symbolic meaning.  Blurring signifies the movement of time and the elongation or loss of a moment, physically experienced as a psychic sensation.  Fleeting memories emerge like images flashing from within the haze of time.  In the blur, details are forgotten.  Obliterating details and especially facial characteristics masks identity and assures anonymity.[i]  Masking identity reveals vulnerability and the need to conceal our inner self.  Blurring is the vehicle of ambiguity.  The viewer’s probable response to Motion Pictures is the perception of a sudden encounter or a transient revelation."   

Leesa Fanning

Appropriating media images from the Internet, “DEMO-” references contradictions in our military involvement in Iraq.  The chilling images of a young, Iraqi boy holding a rifle juxtaposed with the ubiquitous Humvee move me to quiet despair at the conjunction of political power and corporate duplicity in the name of “Demo-craczy”. 

The figures merge with the wall plane.  The wall plane dissolves into an atmospheric space.  The figures dance, turn, tumble, somewhere within the atmospheric space.  There is rhythm and pattern; dancing. 

Prints and drawings.