$7,000,000 for an artwork of small size...do i like it? Art/43/Basel

Jasper Johns "Map", a photo by gleitzeit2012 on Flickr.

Gagosian Gallery 
Jasper JOHNS
"Flag"
ex collection Robert Rauschenberg
$7,000,000

DO I LIKE IT????? the ashes of the flag ... 

body cubism by Stella Richie

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911, Oil painting by Jaisini

911, Oil painting by Jaisini This triptych is an early work where Jaisini had chosen the emergency number as a decorative possibility for associative image making. The artist may like the subject for its close connection to matters of life, death, and super power. He has utilized the idea not only for its symbolic meaning, but also for a visual purpose. In the triptych, side-by-side, coexists a depiction of eternity, ("1" with water), and a briefness of human life ("1" with Icarus). 

The spatial fragmentation is a visual mode that creates a close up view. The large 9, 1, 1 numbers are inserted and incorporated in the paintings' surface which creates an optical illusion, as during a film development, when images emerge from the background. The left part of the triptych is No 9. This painting unites the number with a mob of demons who were brought together by a voodoo dance. The picture is willfully enigmatic but, at the same time, has a great power of not the phenomena it depicts, but rather the medium itself, an integration of the number with images visually. An anomalous space relationship in the three parts creates magic experience of flame, water, and fall. The three parts of the "911" triptych are to be read as a unity from left to right. The layering juxtaposition of images spins the work in a dynamic movement. "9" part exhibits a dance of spells when dark powers unfold the disaster. This left part of triptych with "9" reminds an arched gateway to Hell with the head devil situated diagonally from the top left corner towards the right foreground. This image is actually a large wooden mask with a huge white fang. A blue razor blade pierces its nose. The demon's eyes are rolled in from his exaltation of the weightless, ritual dance. The artist disguises his personages of dark forces as monsters. For ages the Last Judgments on the walls of churches had made much of frightful and grandiose monsters. Jaisini applies the humorous overtone to a theme of supernatural. In the center of "9," there is a nude female demon with red, absent eyes and bulging tongue, which speak more of her own ecstasy than of terror. 

The color of "9" is not of an infernal pit, but instead is a heated color of the African sun that liquefies air. "1" with water shows "Flying Holland," a phantom-ship, a legendary sign of disaster for sailors. The ocean depths hold the remains of the shipwreck. Skulls and treasures suggest of the life's and earthly possessions' transience, "the memento mori" of a physical life. You may question the connection of the three pictures and find some interesting possibilities. What we have in "911" is not a universal course of events. It is an ordeal of one man, who stays behind his creation and is a survived prototype for his own judgment. Neither the beginning, nor the end of his tormented existence is constructed here, but the lesson of a legend is. To fulfill his concept, Jaisini uses the personages of Icarus who is a traditional image of an inventor. The portrayal of Icarus by Jaisini is a spiritual trial, the expression of delimitation that can happen of just-awakened and terrified consciousness of man. Creation brings the artists close to the destructive powers from beyond. Artists and inventors are familiar with this feeling of fall into abyss that can also be a moment of rise. Icarus is shown in the triptych separately from the treasure of the middle part (1 with water) as he is not a mediocre man who used to be the center of philosophical investigation as, for example in Bosch's "Death and the miser." In Jaisini's "911" the Four Last Things, Death, Judgment, Hell, Heaven, turn out in an unusual way.

Icarus looks at the destination of his fall with a weak, last hope, just as the Bosch's dying miser-man, for a miracle. In Jaisini's version, no one passes the test of Last Judgment, except for Icarus. He represents the creative kind, whose legend never dies. He is the one mortal left to face his destiny, yet undecided, is it to be the rise, or the fall? The "911" triptych creates a concept of a life cycle that does not stop, that blasts energy even through death. The work is a new poetic representation of the human dream to reach powers, which do not belong to the human nature. When the limits are being pushed to a critical point resulting in disaster, God is the one who is being called upon. In Jaisini's work, God is not rendered visually, but could be the painting's concept, a code of numbers for help, 9 1 1. The triptych has its aesthetic durability of a new confessional style. Text Copyright: Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb ALL RIGHTS RESERVED New York 2003

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Frank STELLA "Labyrinth"

Frank STELLA "Labyrinth", a photo by gleitzeit2012 on Flickr.

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Blue Reincarnation Narcissus by Jaisini

Blue Reincarnation Narcissus by Jaisini The theme of Narcissus in Jaisini's "Blue..." may be paralleled with the problem of the two-sexes-in-one, unable to reproduce and, therefore, destined to the Narcissus-like end. Meanwhile, the Narcissus legend lasts. In the myth of Narcissus a youth gazes into the pool. As the story goes, Narcissus came to the spring or the pool and when his form was seen by him in the water, he drowned among the water-nymphs because he desired to make love to his own image. Maybe the new Narcissus, as in "Blue Reincarnation," is destined to survive by simply changing his role from a passive man to an aggressive woman and so on. To this can be added that, eventually, a man creates a woman whom he loves out of himself or a woman creates a man and loves her own image but in the male form. The theme of narcissism recreates the 'lost object of desire.' "Blue" also raises the problem of conflating ideal actual and the issue of the feminine manhood and masculine femininity. There is another story about Narcissus' fall which said that he had a twin sister and they were exactly alike in appearance. Narcissus fell in love with his sister and, when the girl died, would go to the spring finding some relief for his love in imagining that he saw not his own reflection but the likeness of his sister. "Blue" creates a remarkable and complex psychopathology of the lost, the desired, and the imagined. Instead of the self, Narcissus loves and becomes a heterogeneous sublimation of the self. Unlike the Roman paintings of Narcissus which show him alone with his reflection by the pool, the key dynamic in Jaisini's "Blue" is the circulation of the legend that does not end and is reincarnated in transformation when autoeroticism is not permanent and is not single by definition. In "Blue," we risk being lost in the double reflection of a mirror and never being able to define on which side of the mirror Narcissus is. The picture's color is not a true color of spring water. This kind of color is a perception of a deep seated human belief in the concept of eternity, the rich saturated cobalt blue. The ultrahot, hyperreal red color of the figure of Narcissus is not supposed to be balanced in the milieu of the radical blue. Jaisini realizes the harmony in the most exotic color combination. While looking at "Blue," we can recall the spectacular color of night sky deranged by a vision of some fierce fire ball. The disturbance of colors create some powerful and awe-inspiring beauty. In the picture's background, we find the animals' silhouettes which could be a memory reflection or dream fragments. In the story, Narcissus has been hunting - an activity that was itself a figure for sexual desire in antiquity. Captivated by his own beauty, the hunter sheds a radiance that, one presumes, reflects to haunt and foster his desire. The flaming color of the picture's Narcissus alludes to the erotic implications of the story and its unresolved problem of the one who desires himself and is trapped in the erotic delirium. The concept can be applied to an ontological difference between the artist's imitations and their objects. In effect, Jaisini's Narcissus could epitomize artistic aspiration to control levels of reality and imagination, to align the competition of art and life, of image with imaginable prototype. Jaisini's "Blue" is a unique work that adjoins reflection to reality without any instrumentality. "Blue" is a single composition that depicts the reality and its immediate reflection. Jaisini builds the dynamics of desire between Narcissus and his reflection-of-the-opposite by giving him the signs of both sexes, but not for the purpose of creating a hermaphrodite. The case of multiple deceptions in "Blue" seems to be vital to the cycle of desire. Somehow it reminds one of the fate of the artists and their desperate attempts to evoke and invent the nonexistent. "Blue" is a completely alien picture to Jaisini's "Reincarnation" series. The pictures of this series are painted on a plain ground of canvas that produces the effect of free space filled with air. "Blue," to the contrary, is reminiscencent of an underwater lack of air; the symbolism of this picture's texture and color contributes to the mirage of reincarnation. "Blue Reincarnation" (Oil painting) by Paul Jaisini New York 2002, Text Copyright: Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Send private comments to author