Perspectives on Roman Zuzuk
Gallery de Boer is extremely pleased to be able to present these unique works by Roman Zuzuk. In the complexities of the modern world, humour is an essential. Zuzuk brings delight to events observed and captured with an easy surrealism, yet gets us to the core of the human experience.
As Veselin Vackov has said in his essay in a monograph on Roman Zuzuk: “Roman Zuzuk’s pictures please people. But not with beauty. His paintings are like old friends: we do not care whether their looks are perfect, but we love listening to them talking… His pictures tell stories. Some are comic, others eccentric or lyrical, but they always come from our own lives and listening to them makes us [feel] better.”
Zuzuk, now married with two children, grew up in the western Ukraine and came to Canada seven years ago. A graduate of the Kiev Academy of Fine Arts, he has exhibited in Holland, Germany, Italy, and Eastern Europe, as well as New York, Montreal, Quebec City and Toronto. From oil on canvas, Zuzuk has expanded his technique to include watercolour on paper and encaustic; pigments mixed with hot wax.
Zuzuk says that his subjects are life experiences, focused on people and animals, with whom we share the planet, all felt with a sense of music or musicality. Although he does not play an instrument, Zuzuk loves music and the sense of motion and fun. He says: “I am painting untold truths.”
Vackov notes: “Yet, the rural life style of his community endowed him with sensitivity and sense of humour that cannot be raised in other conditions. At a young age, he started drawing from nature: his first models were cows at pasture, hens in the back yard,- and flocks of geese flying overhead. But like most modern masters, Zuzuk arrived at primitivist abstraction only through rigorous classical training.”
Influenced by Van Gogh and Chagall, Zuzuk is concerned with time and place in a palpable, directly embodied way. Look closely at what is inside and what is outside his subjects and his canvases. Vackov comments; “Perhaps it is the mixture of religious symbolism with pagan interest in animals and monsters. Through his mirroring of human and bestial forms Zuzuk satirizes human pretensions to refinement and draws attention to the topsy-turvy of destiny.”
