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Birds of a Feather

Michael Sagato’s paintings, each an intimate moment captured in oil on aluminum, arrive right in time for spring blossoms and the thawing of the Manhattan cityscape. The female trios in Love Me Love Me Love Me, People Watching, and 3 Birds of a Feather invoke the mythic threes: the Three Fates, the Three Muses, and the Three Graces. Consider Sagato’s Love Me Love Me Love Me alongside the Three Graces as depicted in Sandro Botticelli’s La Primavera. In both works, a triad of ethereal fair-haired women appears with arms and hands entwined, but Sagato focuses exclusively on the subjects of his pieces and the background falls away. He makes the gesture look easy: to zoom in and contain a single, specific instant. One thinks of Fabien Mèrelle, Sagato’s French contemporary, and his ink and watercolors on paper that feature a single subject or juxtaposition against a white background, which intensifies the encounter between the viewer and the work. While Mèrelle favors small-scale studies, Sagato’s large aluminum canvases allow for figures that are nearly life-size.

Sagato devotes himself to female subjects. Their bodies appear in varying degrees of undress while masks, animal heads, crowns, and other coverings conceal their heads and faces. His depictions of twenty-first-century women raise pressing questions about power, sexuality, social norms, and moral attitudes — perhaps most of all for the female viewer. Sagato’s La Moderna Madonna, her naked breasts revealing nipple piercings, wears a gorilla mask and black lingerie bottoms while standing on a swing painted hot pink. The title of the piece calls to mind the longstanding virgin-and-child tradition in religious portraiture, but there is no baby Jesus in sight here. Is Sagato’s Madonna making a statement about herself as a modern woman who will not be defined by reproduction, a woman who can play on the swing by herself instead of ceding it to a child whose needs will eclipse her own? Is she aping society’s expectations of her femininity? Maybe instead of more questions or discussion, the painting invites action: agency and empowerment through the movement of the swing.

The women in Sagato’s Sandy (as in the hurricane) and René Magritte’s La Grande Guerre share a conversation about war and natural disaster, punctuated by the hydrangea obscuring the female subject’s face in Magritte’s portrait and the floral wallpaper and head-covering made of sticks and twigs in Sagato’s. What conclusions do they come to about tragedy and the feminine, we wonder. Or is the statement here that despite what devastation and disorder befall the human world, the feminine will always retain its necessary ability to allure, to soothe, to contain? And how does Sagato incorporate the wallpaper (damaged during the hurricane proper) into his piece while making it look so natural? Sagato’s Sandy wears yellow kitchen gloves, which reminds us that his Madonna Moderna dons white evening gloves, and we must ask why Sagato’s women need to protect their hands. Given the precautions suggested by gloves, is there dirty work they simply will not do?

The use of humor and bravado, a kind of visually lyric joke meant to invite the viewer, is present in Sagato’s Fertility Time Bomb, where a woman tries to hide under a bed — or maybe she is looking for something — while a dynamite time bomb, attached to a cute and very much alive bunny resting on the mattress above, ticks away. We can identify her only by her legs sheathed in black stockings and her black kitten heels as they stick out from under the furniture.

The rough materiality and masculinity of Sagato’s pieces bring to mind the work on metal of Aaron Young. The honed-in realism of paintings by Jenny Morgan and Tomoo Gokita’s subject-driven compositions speak to the stark, powerful secrets emanating from Sagato’s scenes. Graffiti, street art, and the currency of symbols are present through the markings on the bodies of his subjects — butterflies, words, and stars. The street is a canvas, and so is the body. This is exceptionally clear in the case of Sagato’s collaboration with graffiti artist Curtis Kulig in Love Me Love Me Love Me.

It is of interest here that Sagato collaborates with friends who model professionally and who, in the off hours, play dress up at his Bowery studio with props made mostly by Sagato himself. During these interludes, he photographs his costumed accomplices in order to refer to the images later for his paintings. Sagato appreciates not only their beauty, but also their technique — they know how to angle their bodies in the ways that make them look best. He chooses to obscure their faces so their recognizable features don’t distract us from what Sagato is setting up. His process makes us ask: what is the difference between fashion campaigns and art? Between corporate billboards and personal social-media pages? Between the self as composed by the other’s gaze and the self composed by (and for) self-inspection?

His series Birds of a Feather focuses on a naked female figure with loose long hair. A crown, itself adorned with colorful feathers, sits atop her head, and butterflies decorate her body. They are not meant to be literal tattoos, but rather symbols of the unique, and its infinite manifestations, within each of us. Like most of the female protagonists on Sagato’s aluminum stage, her face is obscured. But something important is different here: she looks at, or past, us with a pair of binoculars. Holding the binoculars backwards, thus the act of looking does not bring things closer, but rather creates distance. What do the figures in the Birds of a Feather series capture with their binocular-enhanced eyes? We want to see it too. We may catch a glimpse of ourselves in the aluminum backdrop, which if blurred and incomplete may be all the more true.

Other kinship is present, perhaps the least suspected kind. For example, Sagato’s Work and Play speaks unequivocally to the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s Bang installation of 886 antique stools made by Chinese craftsmen and arranged in a rhizomatic structure for the 2013 Venice Art Biennale. What does the visual litany of three-legged stools by the revered Beijing artist — known for aesthetic mastery and political activism, who grew up during China’s Cultural Revolution and was jailed by his own government for 81 days in 2011 — have to do with Sagato’s portrait of five ladder-like chairs arranged askew, like a five-pointed star or a jack that’ll be scooped up in the palm of a child? This is a question that may not have obvious answers. But in the case of both pieces, one might use the alternate title Sit or Climb.

Sagato’s paintings playfully celebrate twenty-first-century women, their power, and their impossible choices by making us look again, wonder, and think. While conversant with past and present players, and artistic movements, in fascinating and productive ways, Sagato is most importantly doing his own thing. As he develops his visual language, he borrows and translates freely from advertising, photography, fashion, social media, street art, and the street itself. How do we frame ourselves, and each other, with our eyes, our gadgets, our technologies? How do we visually capture ourselves, and one another, while retaining spirit, movement, dynamism, freedom?

Written by Magdalena Edwards

Taste of Flight — The Painted Worlds of Mike Sagato

Enter a painting by Mike Sagato. To experience any of the New York-based artist’s handsome, densely coded works is a stimulating event. Each seems to include a challenge to reorient oneself — to stop in one’s tracks for a moment and go somewhere with him. Sagato’s meticulously rendered oil-on-aluminum creations are anything but stagnant: they gleam, reflect, absorb, suggest, and conceal. Even his “still lifes” are rich with movement. His vocabulary of symbols and painterly strokes come together in the worlds depicted. They exist at a kind of synaptic intersection of his own devising — places where history and future appear interchangeable and a journey can be its own destination.

Sagato frequently explores what he sees as a lack of balance in the present. Although the artist doesn’t necessarily lament the advent of the technological age, an element of nostalgia does exist in the paintings. He questions without being judgmental, and his painted observations give rise to collective truths. Instagram now often substitutes for conversation; as our forebears used inkwells and turned pages, we text and scroll. Painting itself is arguably quaint — a throwback to a less virtual reality. But the artist methodically mines the time-honored practice for all its metaphoric possibility. Sagato could certainly create and exhibit machine-assisted reproductions of his subjects — the train tracks, flowers, cars, or female models — but instead chooses to revivify them in oil. This pre-historic, post-digital act of painting endows them with a measure of importance; they’re less dispensable and ubiquitous than the immeasurable images that fly past our eyes these days. “We’re struggling to find harmony in society,” Sagato says. His paintings present admiring tableaux, industriously realized, of organized chaos.

Of Mice and Men presents sections of train tracks floating within a void. They’re realistically portrayed in form and shadow, but artfully tangled, weightless, leading nowhere in the known cosmos. Old-fashioned, presumably hand-forged pieces of rail and wood evince past labor done repetitively and proudly. Looking at the painting it is easy to imagine a track-layer admiring his own work after a lifetime of hammering. The painting could be read as a poetic imagining of mankind’s efforts — its Industry with a capital “I” — coming to an existential, even pointless, end. Where did all of this effort get us? But paradoxically, Sagato sees in a lowly piece of train track a worthy endeavor and evidence of innovation, something to be immortalized. And indeed, where would we be without it? The painter celebrates the all-but-antiquated railroad tracks for their symmetry and lines. They remain a means of travel in an increasingly complex, M.C. Escher–esque world.

Sagato clearly appreciates the question reportedly posed by Duchamp to the sculptor Brancusi as the two were visiting a show of aviation: “Who’ll do anything better than that propeller?” “For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.” — Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci conceived of, and grew obsessed with, the concept of air travel centuries before it became a part of quotidian life. A centerpiece of the current exhibition is Sagato’s Delusions of Grandeur 2, one of a series of works on aluminum that depict vintage toy balsa-wood airplanes. These gliders feel both combative and harmless. They maneuver and overlap like vehicles at an urban intersection. Gravity becomes them.

Howard Hughes, a devotee of aviation, is an unseen thematic presence in several of Sagato’s paintings. A billionaire during an era when flight — and speed of any kind — was symbolic of power and progress, his troubled legend is quickly becoming a part of the lost baggage of history. For Sagato, the invention of the flying machine and its vestiges of glamour still fascinate. It represents outsized ambition. An airplane, like all true inventions, moves us forward in unexpected, upside-down ways.

Sagato also utilizes collage elements in his practice. They interrupt the paintings beautifully. Most notably for this exhibition, he places bits of real wallpaper into the works. The shards retain their essence, and in one pencil-on-aluminum work the wallpaper substitutes for actual wallpaper behind a still life on a pedestal table. It hangs in a kind of effigy of itself. When we learn that these pieces of humble wallpaper were discovered by the artist during the ensuing clean-up from New York City buildings after Hurricane Sandy, the decorative elements become talismans. We view their waterlogged scars and dignified, stalwart pattern with added respect.

The worlds of Mike Sagato are both comforting and daring. The paintings are handsome without being austere, filled with color yet muted still — pristine, resolute. They are traditionally staged but in inventive arrangements. A sticker from the band the Misfits coexists with a reimagined cut flower. A silhouetted head is festooned with a crown made of twisted balloons. She is faceless, but magically still beautiful. The reflective and sometimes opaque surface of the blue latex is so expertly recreated that the works seem to be three-dimensional. Paint can become skin, latex, chrome, foam, hair, glass, or steel. Technology hasn’t completely usurped the artistic impulse, Sagato seems to be telling us. And art history wasn’t completely wasted on wasted youth. Discovery continues, and man — still young — never loses an inherent wonder for the universe.

Written by Doug McClemont

Pareidolia

The works in this show are based on John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a book in which Koenig invents words for emotions that don’t yet have names. We’ve all had the experience of trying to describe a feeling and finding that no existing word quite fits. Koenig’s dictionary fills that gap by giving language to those nuanced, hard-to-articulate emotions.

In his own words, he created these terms “to give a semblance of order to a dark continent, so you can settle it yourself on your own terms, without feeling too lost — safe in the knowledge that we’re all lost.” For this exhibition, I selected several words from Koenig’s dictionary and created a painting in response to each one. Each piece is a visual interpretation of one of these invented emotions.

These densely coded oil paintings, rendered on aluminum and epoxy resin — a technique specific to Sagato — allow the audience to delve into their inner psyche. The term Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving an image or a sound wherein the mind perceives a familiar pattern of something where none actually exists. This show is about capturing raw emotion that can only be described through imagery, as words could never do the particular existential experience justice. Sagato’s singular experiences are explained through the definitions that are the titles of each work. To Sagato, the roses are strangers sunbathing in Central Park before the skyline in Pareidolia; in Kuebiko, the broken face representing exhaustion from senseless violence is that of a Prisoner of War.

This interactive experience, similar to Damien Hirst’s dot paintings showcasing how the audience is meant to feel according to different stimuli, allows for these works to be more than just a visual delectation to the viewer. Sagato wants you to experience that time you felt each of these emotions and states of being, in examining each individual’s psyche. Every title explains common conditions of the human experience, though in reality they are unique for each person.

Sagato is able to escape the conventional use of depth and space with aluminum: there is no background, which allows for a floating and surrealist sensation, evoking a dream-like state, making one reminiscent of these states of being. The aluminum also adds another invitation of viewer participation: the reflections of light dependent on the viewer’s positioning in front of the work allows for them to be included as part of the art.

Some of the words from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows that anchor the show: Chrysalism — the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm. Ellipism — the sadness you’ll never know how history will turn out. Enoument — the bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self. Kenopsia — the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling but is now abandoned. Kuebiko — a state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence. Onism — the frustration of being stuck in just one body that inhabits just one place at one time. Opia — the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable. Sonder — the realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own. Jouska — a hypothetical conversation you compulsively play out in your head.

The Elephant in the Room

Composite creatures with animal heads and human bodies have a vast and storied history, one that stretches back to the Paleolithic and is featured in ancient Egyptian and Indian art. To our twenty-first-century eyes, familiar figures like the Sphinx or Ganesh have been essentially relegated to the reservoirs of kitsch, where they may occasionally rub up against more contemporary mascots such as Mickey Mouse and SpongeBob in our collective consciousness. Using such a loaded device in his paintings, Michael Sagato tiptoes through various minefields of cultural signifiers yet somehow manages to emerge from battle seemingly unscathed.

Much like Picasso used the African mask in his monumental Les Demoiselles d’Avignon — coercing it to exclusively explore notions of space while almost willing a complete negation of any imperialist implications — Sagato practically dares us to ignore the elephant in his room. While the apparitions of Jack London’s John Barleycorn and Disney’s Dumbo loom inexorably in these works, in Sagato’s hands the pink elephant — ubiquitous euphemism for drunken hallucinations — is in a perpetual battle for meaning with a host of metaphors, allegories, fetishisms, and pulp fictions.

In Asleep Standing Up, Sagato’s elephant mascot head sardonically rests on a seductive female figure well equipped with the accoutrements of male heterosexual fantasy. Her standard-issue negligee, stockings, and pumps clash hilariously with a cartoonish crown. Rendered in oil on aluminum, the painting has a patina that lurks cloyingly somewhere between the shiny accuracy of a Jan van Eyck and hyperrealism. While the palette echoes the sort of misty black-and-white of a 1940s stag film, the composition owes as much to the staged vacancy of Francis Bacon. Our pinup girl’s right foot is perched precariously on the arm of a rather bourgeois upholstered chair. Her crotch is consumed by the goofy presence of a furry pink elephant trunk — which dangles like an enormously flaccid phallus. Sagato plays with the sublimated fetishism rampant in so much high-fashion photography. In fact, the tableau is drawn directly from a Polaroid photo session. Free to bask in the anonymity which the elephant head provides, her presence in the final work is shockingly self-empowered.

An equally defiant attitude rears its pretty head in Blue Limousine, in which our handcuffed protagonist is bent over the back of a vintage New York City police car. Decked out in a tank top, Daisy Dukes, striped knee-high tube socks and Chuck Taylors, this juvenile delinquent at first glance may seem equally trapped by her fetishistic costume as by her shiny shackles. Somehow, though, the pink elephant head serves to mock the entire stock setup, disrupted by a very sly self-awareness. As we catch an abstracted reflection of our own face in the background, our participation becomes inexorably linked to the highly charged clichés, and we are uncomfortably beginning to resemble Jack London’s anti-hero, who “falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants.”

Sagato achieves a sort of triumphant flippancy with Sound and Vision, his ambitiously cheeky riff on the Danse Macabre. This mischievous take on the medieval allegory painting personifies death through the traditional employment of the skeleton, but the ever-present pink elephant motif flips the script enough to keep us guessing. While one skeleton literally fiddles away his time in an armchair, the other joyfully blows on a French horn from behind his furry headdress. The traditional dance-of-death scene was originally a morality trip which summoned its audience to skip off to the grave, mocking the vanity of earthly delights. But Sagato’s vision revels in moral ambiguity. In fact, this work is as much a celebration of a uniquely American youthful debauchery (colloquially: “Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll”) as it is a cautionary anecdote. The buffed and polished aluminum surface could be just as useful as a traffic warning sign. For in these delirium tremens, the highs and lows of all tomorrows mingle in a hazy netherworld where regrets are worn as badges of courage.

The Play of Shine and Shade

In this body of work, Sagato uses a realistic approach to build a deeply conceptual series of paintings. Each piece reflects the artist’s own — sometimes distorted — view of human psychology.

Every photogenic image is, at its core, an arrangement of light and the absence of it. The way these two forces interact is what makes an image compelling or forgettable. The word “play” carries a theatrical weight, and the emphasis on light and shadow gives the work a sense of drama — but the stories behind each painting lean toward irreverence rather than tragedy. They find comedy in misfortune, levity in the inevitable end of a happy moment, and humor in the quiet absurdity of trying to succeed in a world built on competition.

This work is about not taking life too seriously, even when life refuses to return the favor.