Balint Zsako’s Untitled (Skull of a Woman)
There is a sense in which Balint Zsako is setting himself up to be a kind of successor to Edward Gorey. Zsako shares much with the cranky old master of pen-and-ink perversities, and certainly it’s all there to be seen in the work. For one thing, they have a remarkably similar line, a snaking thing that is at once graceful and stalking. While there are a great diversity of marks in Zsako’s drawings, all of them have that same deliberate pace; nothing with any kind of speed or verve, no sudden gestures or wild, expressionistic outbursts. Gorey’s drawings are much the same: a collection of stately, sharpened lines. Both draughtsmen evoke a kind of spiky effeteness, a delicacy and a refinement that has a sharply acerbic edge.
Until last Sunday, this snappy acidity adorned the walls of Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, in a new show entitled Appetite. All the hallmarks of Zsako’s work are there, writ large and small. There are his easily recognizable figures, intensely coloured blobs of ink whose limbs taper out in all directions: into tiny delicate feet, into miniscule hands and then further into needling fingers, like the prongs on a fork; the women’s torsos taper out into pointed sac-breasts and discreet pockets for vaginas; the men’s torsos taper out into reed-like penises with two neat marble-testicles.
Genitalia are always featured in Zsako’s drawings, and are especially prominent here, both attached to bodies and floating out in the middle of nowhere, poking through bulbous fields of black: a droopy breast, an erect penis, as well as hands and feet and eyes. One of the many perverse delights of these drawings is that, in their acontextual isolation and simplistically cartoonish rendering, there is a kind of equivalency between these anatomies. Pudenda don’t become commonplace; rather, every bit and part becomes strangely sexualized.
The show is replete with sex and death. Bodies of all kinds touch and mingle and hug and rut. When I say of all kinds, I’m not merely referring to the physical shapes of the bodies: in addition to a pervasive external nudity, Zsako also includes an internal nudity. Some bodies appear in a kind of X-ray, a transparent silhouette containing a vast nervous system that spreads and branches; the thick lines of the spinal cord spawns ever thinner and thinner lines, a network of faint wisps. Some bodies aren’t really bodies at all, just eccentric armatures: finely limned planks of wood held together by bristle-thin filaments of white lines (of course, this being Zsako’s universe, they all have carefully constructed genitalia as well).
The show is somewhat Sadeian in tone. All kinds of perversities and cruelties paraded across the gallery walls: in one untitled drawing a man sits atop a pile of corpses, his furious face captured mid-gnaw as he feasts on a dismembered limb, his mountainous distended stomach spilling down the page. And because of the constant erections and tits and bums and vaginas, and because Zsako renders his bodies in such intense, lush colours, the sexuality of the work is pervasive.
Again, sex creeps into everything: the limp skin of a woman’s face sitting next to her skull (around which is written, in huge block letters, “THE SKULL OF A WOMAN”); the drawing of a meek woman holding a paintbrush, standing between two canvasses; the trio of intertwined bulbous ladies (a neat quotation of Botticelli) worshipping a vivid cerulean-blue ghost. But it’s de Sade Lite. It shares the same obsessive cataloguing of sexualities and perversions, but none of the figures have any kind of corporeal weight or fleshiness, and so there is no real bodily horniness or confrontational psychological horror. They are blobs of brightly coloured ink being put through some pornographic paces, sharing an otherwise blank page with ganglia-creatures and cartoon skeletons; no nightmares, but plenty of dark whimsy.
This lack of serious evocative bite is not really anything that gets in the way of enjoying Appetite. The real criticism to be leveled at Zsako and at Appetite is that I have been here before. Zsako has been exhibiting, far and wide, for a while now, and the very first drawing I saw of his looks exactly like the latest drawing made for this show. There have been certain cosmetic changes: in size, and scale, and colour; the skeletons and the side-long art-historical references seem new to me. But all told, Zsako has been making the same drawing for years and years now. He makes part of his living as an illustrator, and it’s easy to see how that reliance on an easily recognizable brand has crept its way into his non-commissioned work. And certainly, his work is good: vivid, colourful, fun, frothy and charming. But I come to a Balint Zsako show knowing exactly what I am going to see. On the one hand, I’m not disappointed; by the same token, however, I’m also never surprised. And too much of the same thing is never a good way to cultivate anyone’s appetite.
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Sholem Krishtalka is the Toronto Standard’s art critic.
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