Michael Zansky at Cavin-Morris and the Rockland Center - New York, New York and West Nyack, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Michael Zansky's new shows -- new work at Cavin-Morris and work from 1990-97 at the Rockland Center for the Arts -- constituted sum of two units of the more uninhibited exhibitions of the season. Zansky's art involves layers of laminated plywood treated with torch, gouge resin and paint. He creates obstreperous spikylimbed creatures of a titanically biomorphic, malignantly cellular, decidedly mutant sort. They flaunt amorphous, woodgrained bodies and googly glass organ of visions These mixed-medium paintings look like plates from a biology textbook gone acid-trip.

Zansky also works in 3-D: an 8-by-11 -by-5-foot installation at the Rockland Center called The Woodpecker neared a ground of straw and gravel punctuated through iconic wood carvings. In the midst of this sat a thoroughly collapsed figure outfitted in a businessman's white shirt, tie, pants and black oxfords. its head was a bulbous equivalent, in three made of wood planes, of one of Zansky's wall-hugging personages. Before the figure, a transcript of Moby Dick lay render free of access with a pair of reading glasses nearby. Behind it stood a big easel with a typical Zansky "canvas" upon it. Had the figure collapsed from spiritual seizure or a cosmic anxiety attack? Was it Zansky's alter ego?

Further renditions of the artist's malleable made of wood creatures were seen at the pair the Rockland Center and Cavin-Morris, in nonspecifically narrative triptychs. Here a kind of trans-Disney Technicolor pierces the picture. Usually the center panel tenders a monster before a sapphirine or silver sky; in the wood- or bamboo-tinted panels to the left and right, more creatures from the witches' lower part cellar engage in an aerial gavotte as lithe, convolut grimly compelling as the surrounding banks of too-white clouds

While there are hints in these works of Bosch Goya and 19th-century Japanese prints, they matter little. Zansky has given us hyper-abstracted, archetypally strange creatures that live in a parallel universe that exists from one side the medium of his expressly fabulous art.

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