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Birds of a Feather that Don’t Flock Together: New Works by Michael Sagato
Michael Sagato’s works are
no one thing. Erotic, provocative, absorbing, and playful, they delve into the
zeitgeist through a classical painting style, and come up for air with
questions of gender, beauty, individuality, and the anxieties of
existentialism. His new
large-scale oils, painted
on sheets of shiny aluminum, quite literally reflect their viewers, as well as
Sagato’s own Lower East Side neighborhood: gritty and rough, with an alluring
air of cool. While reviving his ongoing investigations into the female form,
among these new works, on view now at Jack Geary Contemporary, he also presents still life tableaux that
speak to the current art world. “While
conversant with past and present players, and artistic movements, in
fascinating and productive ways, Sagato is most importantly doing his own
thing,” writes Magdalena Edwards in the introductory essay to the new Jack Geary show. “As he develops his visual language, he borrows
and translates freely from advertising, photography, fashion, social media,
street art, and the street itself.”
At the core of the show is
Sagato’s new series, “Birds of a Feather,” which takes a nude female covered in
butterflies as its protagonist. Upholding the artist’s tendency to obscure his
subjects’ facial features, the figure holds a pair of binoculars over her eyes;
on her head, atop a mane of grayscale hair, sits a crown filled with exotic
blue and orange feathers. Cleverly deploying the phrase “Birds of a feather
flock together,” Sagato isolates his leading lady, a symbolic crutch at her
side, nodding to the values of individuality and its vice-like side effects.
While she ironically searches for companions with binoculars, the device is
pointed in the wrong direction; she is actually creating more distance between
herself and surrounding life. The butterflies that mask her ghostly skin are
representations of the unique qualities a person possesses.
Sagato manages to
seamlessly slip in a final highlight, Love Me
Love Me Love Me (2013), the result of a collaboration with fellow
artist, Curtis
Kulig. Kulig launched his career
by scrawling his now-iconic cursive “Love Me” script all over Lower Manhattan.
Now the script sits atop Sagato’s subjects, three passionately intertwined
women, who recall mythical female trios, particularly the “Three Graces” from Botticelli’s La Primavera. Perfectly encapsulating Sagato’s ability to revive storied
imagery, these works play with allegories of chastity, wisdom, and love,
questioning these virtues in the face of contemporaneity.
“Michael Sagato: Recent Paintings” is on view at Jack Geary Contemporary, New
York, Apr. 24th–May 24th, 2014.
