Commentary
Rob Vander Zee’s art is full of enchantment. We are both transported by vivid landscapes and confronted by human-like creatures who seem to have been cast by a spell into fantastic new species. The place where the artist takes us and the flora and fauna there are clearly imagined, but no less compelling for being so.
Vander Zee imagines a whole world in his ongoing series, Visions of Paradise. His new Eden is vibrantly colored, dream-like and populated by life forms who seem to want to make themselves known to us. Rather than camouflaged, they announce their presence with striking hues and patterns. The quasi-humans pose for our viewing, while the sexy plants try to seduce us. In this world, as strange as it might be, we are welcome to explore. Part of the enchantment in these paintings is the artist’s sheer invention with organic forms. In a group of related paintings, The Evolution of Plants, familiar forms like pods or flowers have grown eyes or mouths or limbs. At times, the underlying plant or animal has combined with other species to create new, mutant organisms. The overall effect is to animate a living world with exotic and curiously conscious beings.
Most striking and unsettling are the beings that have clearly human origins, but are plant or animal as well. Their range is enormous, from the winsome, to the fearsome, to the surreal. Flora and Planta are two portraits of these fantastical creatures. Flora has hair that is a wild bouquet of flowers, while her skin is glowingly patterned, like an amphibian’s. Planta sprouts her own headdress of blooms, and is covered with fine green leaves.
Vander Zee is an ambitious painter who is at home with the cinematic sweep of large canvases. The Water’s Edge is set in a watery swamp of psychedelic greens and blues, on whose mossy tree limbs live unfamiliar life forms. Two naked male figures are each in the act of acquiring a new red and blue skin, while a female figure waits in silhouette. The Canopy l shows two smiling bearded beings, covered with light brown fur, at home in the treetops among crimson blossoms that hang like open mouths.
Vander Zee possesses an ecological imagination, attuned to the natural world and to the otherness we experience in our own lives. He shows us an alternate reality that is both a warning of evolution distorted by human agency, and a promise of our oneness with the living environment.
– John Mendelsohn |
