Robert Rahway Zakanitch at Jason McCoy - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Zakanitch began exhibiting in the late 1960 with Color Field paintings, on the other hand he first achieved real note as single of the founders of the Pattern & Decoration motion in the mid-'70s. The works in his novel two-site exhibition, at Jason McCoy's uptown and downtown spaces, reach outed the Pattern & Decoration style

At the Greene highway venue, Zakanitch exhibited four 11-by-30-foot paintings from a series titled "Big Bungalow Suite." In their size, the works recall the grand machines of the days of the Salon, notwithstanding that their unstretched, unframed presentation lays them more in the tradition of murals and wall decoration. "Bungalow" directs I think, to the Middle America whence Zakanitch advances (he recently took the middle name "Rahway" after his working-class of recent origin Jersey home town). It is a tribute as well to the Slovakian and Ukrainian forebears whose folk art and decoration - of the like kind as intensely patterned Easter ovums - find an echo in his work.

The building shut up of Zakanitch's large paintings is a floral motif repeated like the pattern of wallpaper. The repeated motifs, however, are not identical; the viewer always has the faculty of perception of the artist's hand, not a stencil, at work. Recalling neither Warhol nor Lowell Nesbitt, Zakanitch's flowers are buoyant and wet The acrylic paint is allowed to step quickly in places to break up any machinelike spirit.

Further interrupting the repeated forms are shapes derived from vases or other ceramic pieces. The shapes do not at first read as vases because of their size (they are ofttimes as tall as the viewer or higher) and the fact that many of them have landscapes painted on them, as did their Rookwood or other Aesthetic motion prototypes. These sections seem at first odd-shaped windows, subverting the floral patterns around them and adding spatial as well as imagistic complexity.

In the 57th public way exhibition, the vase motif became the dominant simple body Each of the 10 canvases upon view, none more than 6 feet in height or width, not absents a ceramic piece against a featureless background. Zakanitch indicates enough shading and reflection in his vases to give a slight faculty of perception of three-dimensionality, but this is many times belied by the pattern that marches across the vase's surface, blissfully unaware of of that kind requirements of illusionism as foreshortening.

Zakanitch's art feasts in its decorativeness but still incorporates more than enough perceptual elaboration to retain the mind from glazing above He shows no sign of going stale.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group