<nettime> Drunken Santa (oil painting by Jaisini)

[Yustas61@aol.com]

Drunken Santa
(oil painting by Jaisini)

Drunken Santa is a work that creates a miracle of equilibrium. What seemed
like a clash of an opposite spectrum's colors became the unlikely harmony
in this painting. Jaisini's artistic vision here is formed from two
components of physical and emotional states of being.  Freezing and
heating serve as a symbol to a human need for warming up from the chill of
solitude by means known to people at all times. The artist pursues his art
philosophical quest for worldly knowledge that had left its traces in many
of his works. A line of composition literally ignites the painting's
surface with the movement. The color of this work is "phosphorescent," and
it create the different planes if the subtle color nature. The warm color
of purple supports the hot color of Santa's figure and an exotic fish
above Santa. This hot color may represent the so-called material universe,
the world of the gross senses that can be observed in a sober state. The
cold, arctic blue color represents the unknown, the world of a deep state
of drunkenness where real is unreal and otherwise. The only hard reality
is the self, which never changes in any state. And maybe that is why
Jaisini favors the painting's main hero, Santa, to possess the vivacious
color of fire. Jaisini chooses this color of fire to manifest the self and
the cold cerulean, cobalt and ultramarine to renounce self as a mortal
entity surrounded by the eternal unknown. 
        While Santa drinks, his feelings of frigid loneliness vanish. And
so, he gets a company of some almost hallucinatory nature. A shark, a
ghostly image, a profile of another prototypical drunk who is not
accidentally situated in a horizontal position. An amalgam of the several
female figures that consists of a woman in stockings, a nun, a
big-breasted silhouette that create a shadow between. 
        A heat can be sensed around the hot colored Santa who has lost his
beard and is holding a glass of red wine. He shows his thumb that may be
just a polite substitution for the middle finger sign. 
        The colors of the work are balanced by a virtuoso composition of a
cubist character. The picture's space is divided endlessly. More images
start to appear. The world of "Drunken Santa" vitalizes to almost chaotic
state. The work is a treasure. It depicts and witnesses the intangible
mechanism of reality transformation. In the state of intoxication, what
happens to the solid world of sober state? Everything disappears. It is
just like the dream-world, that we call unreal, because when we are awaken
it is not there. Just so the solid world must be unreal because it also
vanishes in the drunk or deep-sleep states. Then what is reality? In
"Drunken Santa," this problem is elaborated to the triumphant conclusion.
The simplicity of symbolism of the warm and cold colors. The dazzling
composition of figuration superimposed to abstraction. And besides the
beauty of artistic logic, Jaisini's works are marked with the rich,
magnetic colors, as in "Drunken Santa" and others, strikingly attractive
pictures in their intricate game of light and shadow, in their absolute
congruence of visual and conceptual. 

Review of oil painting "Drunken Santa" by Paul Jaisini Text copyrights by
Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb All rights reserved New York, 1999 send private
comments to author Yustas61@aol.com


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