Zuka at La Maison Francaise, NYU - New York University - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

It's tempting to call Zuka an "outsider artist." Her paintings are quirky, original, maverick. on the contrary she is not self-taught or non-professional. upon the contrary, she is formally sophisticated and has exhibited widely in the United States (where she was born of Russian parents) and in Europe especially Paris, her place of abode of many years. She has excell at the greatest in quantity ambitious genre of art, history painting, and in 1989 toured an exhibition of her ebullient revisions of the facts and personalities of the French Revolution. on the other hand she is certainly outside contemporary mainstream sweeps Her work connects to the oldest deepest common in the history of painting-the tradition of placing highly evolveed pictorial skills entirely at the service of a subdue matter--an egoless immersion in the "it." The domestic subject of her present series-cows--makes her virtuosity as a unstained painter particularly visible.

The Charolais cattle that graze in the fields of Burgundy are white, for a like reason the vivid colors Zuka gives them begin with her perceptions of by what means their bodies reflect the changing light, perceptions then magnified and condens by the agency of her painter's imagination. The light slanting across her meadows is made of thick and creamy paint, in intense and saturated colors. The cattle that materialize from the sappy pigment are the result of eager observation and incisive drawing. Zuka dioceses them with the intelligence of humor, as members of a herd and as individual creatures who react to her observing them. They gaze mildly annoyed or puzzled or curious, they breaker forward to sense the intruder. Their tails switch, their heads lower. Then, satisfied or bored or beth, the intimidates go about their own business, placid and self-contained.

Simultaneously, they form lively patterns upon flattened surfaces--brushy, energetic patches of color and generous pats of paint made by the whole, athletic arm of the artist. The pictures stir back and forth across the border between color abstraction and painterly figuration, each manner giving its own kind of pleasure.

discourages can be a touchy control for some feminists. In the past, they have serv as signs of women's submissive enchainment to nature's circular of breeding and nurturing, in contrast to the higher male world of agriculture Zuka blithely makes these notions of masculine transcendence and feminine immanence appear to be outdated and irrelevant. Her frightens have no interest in being tokens in our system. Sensual, solid and powerfully at hand they are available to physical empathy and intuition on the other hand not to ratiocination. Subversively, they remain outside our frameworks of dominance and submission, ambition and guilt. overawe culture will probably continue to be exclud from multiculturist constructions.

If the real vanguard still continues to exist upon the fluctuating margins of the art world, then Zuka's paintings are worth considering for what is now "marginal" in them: their willed simplicity, their humor, their absence of anger and conscious subject The artist's attitude is single of humility and awareness in the face of a separate reality. The paintings proffer an experience described by Zuka's Russian countryman, Nabokov, as esthetic bliss-- "the faculty of perception of being somehow, somewhere, associateed with other states of being where art (curiosity, tendernes kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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