Social Deviance # 31

Pinocchio

  (Oil painting by Jaisini)

  Jaisini, an artist of a new time and age, looks at the traditional art 
  concerns of good and evil in a wider perspective. As we all know, this used 
  to be a standard Biblical subject for the artist's exploration of the two 
  sides of human nature.

  In Pinocchio, Jaisini introduces the performance of late modern critical 
  nature. It is a moralizing representation which is open to interpretation. 
  Little in Jaisini's art is straightforward representation. Most elements are 
  open to variety of interpretations, though a presence of devil in Pinocchio 
  brings us closer to the original concern.

  As we know, from the history of art, in the art works of medieval times, 
  especially in the paintings of Bosch, devils appear among people during their 
  ordinary working lives. It epitomized the medieval belief in the real unseen 
  existence of demons and devils everywhere.

  For Jaisini it may be a simplest message of the ever-present antagonist to 
  the human corrupt nature. The pictorial language of the artist is based on 
  his search for the unusual associations. Here, Jaisini has produced a 
  remarkably dramatic evocation of a turmoil at the party table. The idea of 
  Pinocchio may be the Bosch's type illustration of the body prevalence over 
  spirit.
  Jaisini does not show tormenting but a more contemporary kind of punishment 
  as a birth of a black child with a knife. His white mother is covered with 
  table cum-stained cloth. When the true image of the childbirth is revealed, 
  the shock tactic invades the space. The orgy itself, the table and under the 
  table seem like a replay of a crime scene.
  The giving birth mother exposes the unattractive site of birth. Her privacy 
  is violated as she is a participant of the table orgy it seems like some 
  distant laughter echoed evilly in her attempt to give birth to that violent 
  child with the knife that cannot yet kill but targets surrounding world with 
  it's pirate like curve.
  In Pinocchio the gap between the hard, prosaic reality grows more and more 
  and the dreamy flexireality may be able to reflex more truthfully 
  contemporary life with it's complexity.
  No court of law yet defined the art guilty of such reflection of unwanted 
  truth, mimicking the facts of physical world in connection of unlikely 
  situations and less expected interpretations.
  In the Pinocchio the puppeteer behind the staged performance of the orgy is 
  supposed to be the author of the painting, but is he?
  The artist seems to be a mediator of social sadistic fantasies who entered 
  them through artistic mode on the canvas with almost childish frivolity but 
  with serious impact. In his works the heroes are freed from the burden of the 
  gendered flesh being puppets at the same table with people and creatures of 
  superpower or animals. The works like Pinocchio, 911, Meat Grinder have some 
  posttraumatic content of the world in a process of loosing emotional content 
  with its murderous rage and maniac annoyance of speeded change.

  The orgy which takes place at the table and under it could symbolize the 
  notion of an 'absolute democracy.' To the artist that is satirical, cynical, 
  and tragic all at the same time, 'the most shameless thing.' Jaisini shows a 
  committee of three at the same festive table where two are absent. The ruler 
  is introduced by the liar Pinocchio. The birds symbolize politicians whom 
  artist saw as representatives of the evils inherent in the legal and 
  political machinery.

  By arranging the partitions of the bodies by the table cloth, which covers 
  and opens bodies portions, Jaisini lends an erotic dimension to the somber, 
  grisaille color of the painting. The effect of sobriety, the controlled orgy, 
  not a temperamental and eager as in Hot Dog Party, but rather dead is 
  achieved here. It seems that the table cloth demarcates two realities, which 
  are not that different from each other, with the same signs of sinnery, 
  evoking man's abstruse appetite for 'bad.'

  The table cloth opens a view that an aphorism describes well: "the only 
  truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so."

  Jaisini doesn't adopt both, reality or unreal. He allows his works to receive 
  different interpretations and to continue offering a mystery. A super 
  plasticity and integration in Jaisini's work sketch out a new cosmology with 
  the senses translated into visual terms.

  The 'table' composition in Pinocchio, Hot Dog Party, Barbie Q, and so on, 
  creates a phenomenological experience of space. Some things are effective and 
  eternally magnetic. Jaisini as an alchemist, searches for a philosopher's 
  stone which can transmute base metals into gold.
  He canonizes the technique of his enclosed composition of a secluded live 
  together with the continuous idea, almost a myth, a riddle, a fascinating 
  concept, the artist creates a new reality, fully integrated, with its own 
  laws and reasons for existence.

  The choice of images like Pinocchio, which are grotesque, brings the image to 
  a new universal meaning. The clowns and fools are the representatives of the 
  carnival spirit in the everyday life. In the Bosch's "Ship of Fools' the 
  scene is presided over by a jester fool, whose role is to satirize the morals 
  and manners of the day. Fools posses the time-honored privilege to be other 
  in this world, the right to be in life but not of it, the right to confuse, 
  to tease, to act life as a comedy and to treat others as actors.

  Jaisini's style is marked by theatrical whimsicalism. His use of fools in 
  some works could hold the artist's hope for humanity, hope that life is not 
  necessarily predetermined towards loss, failure, and catastrophe. To the 
  contrary, the artists like Bosch believed that sins of humankind are endemic 
  and that hell is our ultimate destiny.

  Jaisini creates in a carnivalesque tone his Show Time, Talk Show, Hot Dog 
  party. Barbie Q, Lunch Time, Sinphony , etc., which reflects the current 
  condition of historical development when life becomes a permanent mixed 
  eruption of excitement, spectacle, happiness, joy, tragedy, loss, conflict, 
  dilemma, terror, and death. Still, human destiny is conceived as open or at 
  least as not finally tragic and not predetermined to failure, but can change 
  and transform. 
  The artist gets his impetus and irrepressible energy to create in sometimes 
  carnivalesque tone, as a social critique, nonetheless serious for being 
  theatrical, extravagant, and playful.
  Carnivalesque may remain an always dangerous supplement, chellenging 
  destabilizing, revitalizing, pluralising single notions of true culture, true 
  reason, true art.

  by Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb