Invisible Paintings From 1994 Anniversary Celebration NYC 2014
WAS THIS ESSAY WRITTEN ABOUT A PAINTING THAT NEVER EXISTED? Cave Kaleidoscope
Oil painting on linen Plywood support 37” x 37” Signed “Das Ich und das Es” series
Paul Jaisini finds new meaning for enclosed line composition of his Gleitzeit style in an interesting concept of “Cave Kaleidoscope” to look at art from a distance of passing time. The title of this picture associates the work with cave painting. In cave painting of Paleolithic artists the painting technique tends to be highly overlapping and superimposed, scrapping and obliterating with many traces of activities obscuring possibility of true interpretation.
In CK Paul Jaisini achieves sense of complexity with his personal formula of enclosed continual line composition with puzzle-like set of images and meanings. Line was a main visual information carrier in cave art such as for example in cave of Lascaux where the walls and ceiling are covered by linear painted and engraved figures. In CK linearity is noticeable as in works of Gleitzeit period united by a circular connection of composition where line is uninterrupted. The enclosed line and its persistent curvilinear movement associate with three-dimensional space of a real cave by means found in non-perspective depiction of Cave K. The effect of space is achieved here by flowing dynamic line that unfolds color variations and bends flat surface as a sculptor’s hand cutting out the material for the formation of his three dimensional object.Colors of the painting are pure and bright balanced by the effect of the overall stone-like texture and gray background.
Delineation in C K does not separate images from the background.
In this painting images seem to adhere to the grainy cave-like texture.
The choice of imagery leads to guess the painting’s meaning as if a fleeting memory-flash with a load of images from the past life that turns into a cluster of events.
A baby blows a pipe; its contour line to the contrary depicts a silhouette of an aged hairless personage whose twisted limbs gravitate to the ground.
In the center of composition there is a female looking up at a bird while a profile forms out of her bodyline; the man’s head that is divided by pastel colors; blue of skull, rose of arched brows, slightly more red on aquiline nose, that disperses in violet on the chin accented by the dark areas of a suit’s collar. The man’s phallic finger touches a sitting woman with legs spread apart in the lower part of the picture. Color of her body blends pastel blue into violet, with addition of washed out rose that creates special texture of bared flesh. Her yellowish upper body is divided by what could be a line of sun shadow.
More silhouettes start to appear as in all of Jaisini’s paintings from obscurity of background and line interaction brings new subject ideas.
The contemporary diversity of cave painting interpreted by Jaisini offers human imagery instead of animal. Does it signify that human animal is a dominating kind? It seems to be an appropriate reading of the message that artist sends into the future, just as cave painter did thirty two thousand years ago when he painted a various menagerie of rhinoceroses, felines, bears, owls, and mammoths now turned into historical monuments. Most cave
paintings were examined to learn the depiction of the line with magnifying glass that revealed the continuous line having number of missing portions of paint worn away by erosion.
In Jaisini’s contemporary cave painting we find the line to be young, not broken, or eroded by time, but uniform, clean, and freshly made. The surface of the painting elaborates color in its purity refined by a micro web of a technique that creates infinite graphical development of surface as it would be in enlarged version of Pollock’s drip surface.
The images are bonded to the ground in a way that brings to mind the drip painting with cut out shapes where as T.J. Clark has pointed out the picture ‘is not a drip painting but a painting made out of a drip painting.’ In CK the images seem to be formulated by the micro texture with some natural quality of immediate belonging to that surface with endless variations of colors that seem to test the capacity of color’s infinite refination to achieve highest clarity. The integrity of the surface’s texture and purity of color add up gracefully creating immediate connection of color with micro and main macro graphics of the line. In CK Jaisini shows another way of creating a homogeneous visual fabric. It is striking the way the images develop from the surface and from the line not premeditated due to the artist’s working style without study and preparation.
In a subtle relation to cave art Cave Kaleidoscope is an interesting message to the future. Looking at the work 50 years and up from now we should pick out things from this time capsule that still have physical importance and carry the message of significance even after the contemporaneity dies off, the content of the CK painting maybe no less historically monumental.
Paul Jaisini chooses a scenario of human life to portray the time in its tangible reality. This is what human life is made of, family, love triangles, childbearing.
The concept of cave painting was among first extant examples of human power to think beyond immediate needs. It’s also interesting to look at the Paul Jaisini’s Cave Kaleidoscope painting in terms of Egyptian symbolic as any art relates to myth not always in an obvious way. A myth, creation, and daydreaming are related. The three phenomena derive from an early childhood and fulfill wishes unsatisfied in reality.
Cave Kaleidoscope could be a perpetuation of a memory at a cave or a tomb wall. According to Ancient Egyptian mythology the creative power of life was inherent in every being and accompanied them, like a kind of a double, until death. The Egyptians believed that gods had lived for thousand years before man, but like humans, they had died and been buried. So the ritual for tomb owners was to bring gifts to insure and perpetuate their own memory to reincarnate. All that takes place in human life should be immortalized in this ritual. What we find in CK imagery is a baby, a woman, another woman and a man all to be reincarnated as main life’s questions, dreams of childhood, expectation of miracles, dream of flying, fantasies, and search for ideal mate.
As an artist Paul Jaisini based his creation only on personal viewpoint without direct connection to any school of thought.
The roles of his images in painting could be interpreted in many ways.
The central woman looks up at a bird while her man is seeking a new affair; he is touching a secondary by meaning female.
In the context of a cave or a tomb the bird might represent Horus, the sky god of Egyptian mythology.
The image of male conceiving adultery can lead to erotic symbol of sexual potency represented in Egyptian burial art by adult male baboon.
The role of male baboon transforms to an ambitious attired man.
Cave Kaleidoscope pays homage to eternal human passion for life after death, desired child, and search for ultimate pleasure.
The work has an appearance and concept of everlasting now.
Day-to-day contemplation of this painting brings new discoveries while the work remains essentially the same. The progress of understanding only brings more aesthetic pleasure.
Paul Jaisini’s pictures and Cave Kaleidoscope in particular refuse to cease interest with time. Paul Jaisini filters the relation to reality through a mechanism that
allows serious rethinking and ideology of his art access the reality that can’t be direct but throughout what Lacan called “imaginary” thought fictions.
As Althusser’s argument suggests ideology is not eternal but something that could be challenged by other specific ideologies, alternative fictions to the one specific ideology that holds sway over the majority of people in society.