WHITNEY BIENNIAL CATALOGUE, 2004~Howie Chen

Zak Smith's stylized portraits and acidic abstractions intimately capture stillness in an ever-encroaching world. His works demonstrates and deconstructed neo-punk aesthetic conversant in comic book-style drawing, vivid psychedelic coloration, experimental photographic processes, and traditional draftsmanship. Using his friends and his immediate environment as subjects, Smith renders scenes of youthful ambivalence amid a surplus of surrounding diversions and possessions.

Smith's works includes acrylic portraits based on scenes from his life and images created using experimental photographic techniques. Central to his work is a balance of seemingly disparate aesthetic modes. Using visual elements from painting, drawing and photography, Smith achieves a hybrid effect that vacillates between sober realism and electrifying abstractions. Self-Portrait for the Cover of a Magazine (2001) shows the artist crouching in a room strewn with junk, including cassette tapes and an overturned skateboard. The juxtaposition of his disaffected persona against a painstakingly wrought mosaic background reflects the coexistence of a rebellious punk attitude with a meticulous attention to form.

This duality continues in a the relationships he creates between lines and color: in V in a Corner with a Stuffed Rabbit (2002), which depicts his recurring muse Varrick in a cluttered bedroom, the liberal splashes of bright color serve as counterpoints to the hard graphic edges that delineates the form of the painting In other works directly inspired by comic book art, such as Life Will Not Break Your Heart It Will Crush It (2003), Smith explores photographic portraiture by abstracting an image into geometric seriality, mimicking the panels of comic strips.

Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow (2004) consists of more than seven hundred individual drawings, paintings, and photographic works assembled in a grid formation. According to the artist, these images, which range in style and compositional focus, functions as visual equivalents to the bookÇs episodic narratives and highly digressive structure. The work can be read as one large abstract composition or in a more intimate way as elements of an open dynamic narrative. The numerous permutations of visual starting points and paths allow for multiple and simultaneous narrative formation within a discrete body. Many of these individual images have also appeared as decorative backdrops for SmithÇs portrait works, calling attention to a sense of play between these different modes of representation.