Sapien Series, 48” x 48’, 2023, Burnt plywood and Acrylic wood panel

By DONALD KUSPIT, July 2023

A Walpurgisnacht, a Pandemonium, a Satanic comedy, riotous to the point of debauchery.  Now pure tomfoolery, now avid with the lust of blood.    -- Paul Valery, commenting on the periodical La Caricature, 1830-1843 

Meticulously executed masterpieces—I think that’s the best way to describe the twenty-four paintings in Michael Zansky’s “Sapiens” series.  Why not “Homo Sapiens,” the name human beings have selected for themselves?  But Zansky’s figures are not exactly wise and human, “homo” being the Latin word for “human,” “sapiens” the Latin word for “wise,” but violent, vicious creatures, grotesquely malformed.  They have a certain affinity with gargoyles, the waterspouts designed to drain rainwater from the roof of a building, in medieval churches often given the form of fanciful, mythological creatures.  They are apotropaic sculptures, often evil-looking monsters, intimidating but serving a good purpose:  the protection and preservation of a sacred space, a temple of God, and as such keeping the faith however faithless they may look, for animals by nature are faithless, unaware of the God who created them.  However aggressive, menacing and sinister they seem, they are nowhere near as aggressive, menacing and sinister as Zansky’s humanoid figures—figures that look like human beings but are inherently inhuman—and nowhere near as imaginative.  Gargoyles, however grotesque, are formed by associating familiar realities, indicating they are rationally constructed, but Zansky’s figures are irrationally conceived, deformed and debased, bizarrely disfigured, their parts—not always all of them—laid out on the canvas as though on an operating table:  Zansky is an anatomist of the absurd.  

Sapien Series, 48” x 48’, 2023, Burnt plywood and Acrylic wood panel

Gargoyles are consciously invented three-dimensional sculptures, their rounded bodies occupying social space, while Zansky’s two-dimensional figures—mercilessly deconstructed not to say ruthlessly disintegrated--are the spawn of unconscious fantasy—instinct run wild.  Their bodies flattened, manneristically distorted, and ruthlessly broken to surreal pieces, they become devilish caricatures of human beings, evil epitomized in perverse human form, conceived in the insane depths of the unconscious.  Valery has suggested that a caricatured figure is a kind of puppet or toy; Zansky’s fragmented figures are like broken toys, malfunctioning puppets, mechanical devices pretending to be organically alive.  Anatomy is perversely distorted in a caricature to make a psychological point; Zansky’s caricatures are physical incarnations of insanity.  

Sapien Series, 48” x 48’, 2023, Burnt plywood and Acrylic wood panel

More broadly, Valery argues, “caricatures give the impression of a Dance of Moral or Intellectual Death.”  The death instinct in aggressive action is in fact the psychodramatic theme of Zansky’s fiendish caricatures, the fiend being an enemy of life, mocking life by embodying death:  a fiend is the Devil incarnate.  In the Bible a fiend is incorrigibly wicked, cruel, brutal—a supernatural evil being personifying Death.  He is cold as death in Dante’s Inferno, but hot with hatred in Zansky’s infernal art, confirming that he is all too human rather than a myth.  If, as the psychoanalyst Ernst Kris writes, “the caricaturist seeks for the perfect deformity,” then the devilish figures in Zansky’s caricatures are perfectly deformed, for he has shown how aggression can turn a person into a monster, a deformed semblance of a human being.  Daumier mocked King Louis-Phillippe by deforming his head so that it seemed to be a pear, slang for fathead.  More nihilistically Zansky damns human beings by deforming their bodies so that they seem to be devilish, for their hands have become claws, as they do in Sapiens 1, 2, 4 and snarl like animals in Sapiens 3, 8, 10.  In Genesis 3 the devil takes the form of a serpent, in Revelation 12:9 the serpent has become “a great dragon,” more broadly a “beast.”  The bizarre figure in Sapiens 4 and 13 is clearly a serpent—the sinister “serpent of old” in confrontational form.  The twin snarling beasts that poke their heads above the horizon line—the line that divides the head and shoes--in Sapiens 12 and 14 are devils.  Zansky’s devil is not a seductive tempter, like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, sensitive to the consequences of his sinful, wish-fulfilling temptations, but more like an aggressive medieval demon, indifferent to the suffering he has caused, indeed sadistically delighting in it.  Zansky’s representation of the devil as a vicious, sadistic creature has much in common with medieval representations of the archetypal devil, a creature with no conscience and as such an inhumane monster, suggesting Zansky’s deep insight into the fundamentals of the human psyche.

 Sapien Series, 48” x 48’, 2023, Burnt plywood and Acrylic wood panel

Sapiens 1 makes the point decisively:  twin bodiless figures, their arms and legs bizarrely fused in one seamless form—reminding us that the devil can change form at the blink of an eye and can multiply at will--his eyes covered suggesting that he is blind to the violence his claw-like hands threaten the viewer with, confronts us, threatens to pounce on us.  I suggest that the work—all of Zansky’s works in the series—has the form of an altar:  a devil’s altar, an altar dedicated to the worship of the devil.  The fact that the devil’s claws appear in a large golden oval—a sort of aura teaming with spermatic life, suggesting its parthenogenetic power—at the bottom of the work, and that a similar but smaller golden oval appears at the top of the work, containing a grimacing animal devil, suggests as much.  It is a cosmic scene—a surreal cosmos—the lively sperm—little devils--swim in the clear blue sky, waiting to come to earth in the form of fallen angels.  One might say that the twin brownish grayish blind half figures are the devil ready for earthly action, as their threatening grimace, with their bared teeth, suggests.  Their shoes seem like boxing gloves, in my fantasy, suggesting they are ready to hit out at the spectator, certainly menace him.  Surrealism is supposedly a fusion of dream and reality, but this work—all of Zansky’s Sapiens—are nightmares.  The ancestor of Zansky’s grandiose animalistic monsters is the demonic ape-like imp crouched on the body of the sleeping woman in Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, 1781.  Zansky’s works are more nightmarish, for Fuseli’s perverse imp, passively resting on the woman, has become Zansky’s manic monster, impulsively threatening everyone.   

Sapien Series, 48” x 48’, 2023, Burnt plywood and Acrylic wood panel

Blue skies, aureole-like ovals, spermatic or worm-like forms recur again and again in Zansky’s Sapiens series, and above all, insistently, an aggressively, not to say cruelly, grimacing head, as in Sapiens 10, 11, 13.  So what are we to make of the child’s or infant’s head, sometimes crying and doubled, as in Sapiens 16 and 17, sometimes laughing, as in Sapiens 10, sometimes quizzical, as in Sapiens 13, and sometimes and adolescent or young man with a Pinocchio nose, suggesting that he is guilty of telling a lie.  I suggest that they convey what Freud called a “family romance” gone wrong:  instead of gaining freedom from their actual parents by replacing them in fantasy by better parents—parents socially superior to theirs, Freud noted, making the children feel superior to their parents—Zansky’s children replace their parents, more particularly their father, with a worse father, indeed, a threatening monster, making them feel small and insignificant, as Zansky’s victimized children are.  Is Zansky’s father crying, as he is in some works, because Zansky has turned him into a devil?  

Sapien Series, 48” x 48’, 2023, Burnt plywood and Acrylic wood panel

Zansky’s Sapiens works are fairytales, enchanting and macabre at once, reminding me of the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim’s view that “the extreme violence and ugly emotions of many fairy tales serve to deflect”—I would say reflect—“what may well be going on in the child’s mind”—and in everyone’s dynamic unconscious, as Freud called it.  Childhood is never over, for childhood anxieties and fantasies inform adult anxieties and fantasies.  What to me is most striking about Zansky’s Sapiens series is his use of the double, “found in primitive animism as a narcissistic extension and guarantee of immortality,” but it can “become a foreshadowing of death,” and a persecutor.  As Freud wrote, the double is uncanny, for it is emblematic of the unconscious, bespeaking its bizarre doubling of experience in dreams.  The double has been said to be a soul in limbo, rather than in heaven or hell, although it seems clear that Zansky’s devilish double is in hell.  “The devil has become an image of terror,” Freud wrote, and Zansky’s devilish caricatures are terrifying, however peculiarly comical a caricature is, humor being a defense against dread, the dread the devil embodies in his twisted, grotesque body and especially his animal claws.  Zansky’s works are precariously balanced between comedy and tragedy, and as such masterpieces of ambivalence.  If, as Aristotle wrote, “the aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance,” then Zansky is a great artist, because he has turned the outward appearance of human beings inside out.  WM