Apart from the artist's stylistic assuredness and the embedded narratives that one might deduce from seeing bold images of Eduard Zentsik, the artist is primarily fascinated with ontological investigation. Meshed within this overriding motif is the artist's work that insists on fabulous implausibility that fills the mind with haunting hallucinatory and often visionary excesses. This work can only emerge out of a visionary understanding of the cultural context and the inner workings of the present state of the world.

But it would also be accurate to say the artist's vision has a tragic undertone. And it is this undertone (in spite of the often bright coloristic applications insinuating an uncanny admixture of surreal adumbration and outsider art with Pop Art surface treatments) which gives the artist's work its edgy feel, its haunting authenticity. In this case, it is appropriate to recall that the term “outsider art” was coined by Roger Cardinal as an English synonym for art brut.

The viewer will also discern through Zentsik’s visual notations that the artist is concerned with the idea of mutation and metamorphosis. This is a type of writing, in the broad sense, in which the canvas is used very much as a sheet of paper as a type of mystic writing pad on which, if we are to believe Freud, is a model of the psyche. Zentsik juxtaposes different realities allowing the mind to find integration in dissimilarity, in a dramatic cathartic interchange of worlds that blend the symbolic, the real and the imaginary.

The artist pits together a near claustrophobic intensity of enclosed space in which we see a great liberating conflagration of surging elements (often competing humans, animals and other creatures) struggling to assert themselves. These entities form part of and are set-off from what appear to be vast expanses of other-worldly terrain that are meant to defy human needs and desires. Through these imposing grandiloquent images Zentsik gives expressive form to the near-inchoat impulses and instincts that appear to predominate over feeling and intellect. Simultaneously, his implied scale shifts drives home the sense of sublime anguish and delight felt in the presence of some uncomprehending force greater than the sum total of human experience.

Zentsik’s impulses contain strains of all of the aforementioned art forms laminated onto a distinctly twenty first century feeling for emblematic effects and pictorial planes with elements of social subversiveness. It intensifies the mix of influences to produce an exhilarating series of works. Here the artist presents an inner landscape of moods and dreams, sensual intoxication, the opposite worlds of nature/culture.

Was born 26.12.1975 in Sillamae, Estonia.

Painter, photographer, graphic artist, designer, author of installations, performances and musical improvisations. Organizer of youth exhibitions and projects.

Member of the Russian Artists Union in Estonia.
Member of the Photographers Union in Estonia.
Member of art societies "April", "Yezi".
Collaboration with magazines, auction houses and galleries of Europe.

z.eduard@yahoo.com

http://www.photoline.ru/author/8482?prevprt=on
http://street-photo.ru/users/zeduart
photodom.com/member/zed

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