​Tsion Agai

          "I don't take art seriously", Tsion Agai told me recently in his studio. But, he added, "I do it seriously".

 

          It might sound like a casual remark, but it suggests a couple of interesting and important distinctions. First, it is hard to take "art" seriously in a culture that has so debased its values, too often substituting commerce for intrinsic quality, and superstar celebrity for dedication to the slow path of growth to maturity of vision.

 

          Additionally, Agai 's comment offers a valuable insight into the distinction between product and process. "Art" is what remains when the work is completed; for the truly engaged artist, it becomes almost irrelevant at that point. It's significant that what counts for Agai is the "doing it", what happens in the encounter between artist and material in the studio.

 

          The rest of us, though, get more simply to enjoy the results of the artist's work. In Agai 's case, these are highly original, playful, colorful sculptures which are at once thought-provoking - and a lot of fun. For the most part human-scale in their proportions, they engage us in the kind of dance the poet John Milton once called "the light fantastic". At times sensual and erotic, at times exuberantly decorative, at times even dark and troubling, they keep the viewer on his toes, moving, exploring, always curious to know more, wanting to explore their surfaces with forbidden touch.

 

          Agai works with materials that are distinctly non-precious, and mostly disposable. He starts with cheap roofing paper and rags - materials he favors because he finds them "unpredictable". Compounding them with resin and other mediums, he molds the basis structures he will later work with: strange, fragmentary, organic, abstract ("abstract expressionist"?) elements which are then ascending shapes that form the central "trunk" from which the sculpture will finally emerge. It's a process the artist describes as "almost like a garden, where things grow with endless possibility."

 

          These basis shapes are then embellished with the addition of equally cheap, equally disposable, mass-produced items, of which Agai finds an inexhaustible supply at local 99 cent stores: Plastic toys and dolls and military ware, kitschy artificial flowers and fruits, baskets and table ware- objects for which event tasteless, but which this artist rescues from oblivion and recycles with obvious relish in his sculptures.

Once the pieces are assembled to his satisfaction, Agai goes to work with another material that mot of his contemporaries would regard with deep suspicion, as being beyond the pale of current aesthetic respectability: synthetic flocking. Working with the now firm, velvety surface, he creates the finish by rubbing dry pigment into their texture. His goal is to make it luscious and candy-like enough to tempt the viewer to "break off a piece and eat it".

 

          His sculptures do have that quality. To wander round a space in which they are installed is to be a child again in Candyland, filled with delight and wonder at the objects that surround you, bringing you own imagination into play. You'll chuckle when you eye stumbles on the spectacle of a crocodile in hot pursuit of a baby strapped to the back of a plunging whale. You'll laugh to discover a super-human he man-man, stripped to the waist and wielding a bottle of baby formula, or a tiny gorilla back-to-back with a giant rat. Your mind will soon start inventing stories, lured by these playful images into its own spirits of playfulness. You are engaged. You find yourself in the process that the artist models for you, a whimsical adventure in time and space.

 

          There are "meanings" to be found here, if you will. This is not the primary purpose of the artist, but it becomes, for the viewer, almost irresistible. There are incipient stories here about power and its potential for abuse; about heedless waste that has become a part of our culture, the mass production of things that are created with the expectation of speedy disposal; about the false seductiveness of materiality and the superficiality of surface appeal. If it pleases you, there is opportunity here to reflect on the excesses and absurdities of art itself, and on the commercial system that supports it. As the artist himself suggests, this particular (self-consciously "high bro"?) art world. There is a quiet, joyful exuberance about the work that feels quietly, exuberantly subversive.

 

          In the end, it all comes back to process, to the simple curiosity about objects and materials that provokes the questions artists ask themselves: what can I do with this? Where will this take me? What happens if I put this one thing together with this other? What is it I can make that I have never seen before? Says Agai, again, "I like to flirt with the unknown."

 

          There is also, be it said, importantly, a baroque quality to this artist's work. It strikes me as "metaphysical" in the sense that T.S Elliot used the term in writing that famous essay about "The Metaphysical Poets"; in its ornate physicality, it adumbrates the darker aspects of earthly existence, the shadow side that speaks to us of the realities of pain and death. Consider, for example, the (almost) lovely but somehow chilling work, "The Heat of the Moment", where the gracious, pinkly-hued (but three-legged) dancing figure recalls, at the same time, the skeletal participant a dance of death; and where the centrally-placed and gaily decorated image of the rocket/phallus is attached to the rigid, rabbit-eared, eerily floating figure of a man in space.

 

          This is the quality, I think, that lends an emotional complexity and weight to work that otherwise likes to tease us with its decorative charm, it is work that is content to speak us lightly of serious matters, and to touch us gently in the places we might hurt the most.