JENIK’S EXALTATIONS
By D.F. Colman
Jenik’s sensitively painted works on paper seize you (somehow, gently)
by the throat and they don’t let go. This sensitive art-making process
isn’t so sweet and guiless any more. The work shakes rattles and rolls
as it sings sweet lullabies to the viewer. There is an unabashed
passion, which makes itself evident in artist’s latest body of work,
reflecting sonorous and deeply creative mind.
What we sense and feel in Jenik’s recent works on paper are the
cumulative energies of grand modern masters such as Sam Francis’ works
of the late seventies, Miro’s elaborate overall works of the fifties
and the propulsive yet lyrical surges of Franz Kline’s energies, albeit
softened with just the right touch of Jenik’s ever-present lyricism.
One of Franz Kline’s finest remarks has to do with painting. He noted
that making a painting was like "hand-stuffing a mattress". By that he
meant that the artist starts with a flat screen and through the use of
his skills and his artificing enables the pictorial surface to achieve
a depth, what the French would call "un gonflement d’espace." The
painting’s literal flatness has been pumped up and is afloat with
pneuma, with spirit, with form and, of course, substance. The flat
mattress of the two dimensional surface has become volumetric as the
artist has stuffed it with planar dimensionality.
This is certainly true of Jenik’s work as she attempts again and again
to reach a point, visually speaking, where spatial momentum starts to
sway. The body metaphor that perhaps is most apt is the clenching and
unclenching of a fist; this dual momentum occurs in all of the artist’s
works. It creates an unwavering vitality that permeates all of Jenik’s efforts.
We see this so effectively in Untitled #05.05 and #06.05 where washes
of color trickle down the surface only to be buoyed up with transparent
washes, incidents of color that are airy and floating. In Untitled #01.05 the artist offers us screens of activities; layers of optical fields open up to the viewer as secret palimpsests being viewed for the first time. In Untitled ## 02.05, 03.05,04.05 we sense Jenik’s masterful propulsive and turbulent calligraphic energy which creates a sensation of strong currents traveling in and throughout the pictorial surface at different speeds.
Jenik’s looming and tremulous markmaking and use of color evoke the
gathering point of fading perceptions and the locus of newly emerging interpretations that include the persuasive unraveling of closed systems. Playfulness and paradox infiltrate the artist’s efforts. One of these paradoxes, visually speaking, is the issue of relative space which allows us as viewers to conceive of parts of infinite spaces, voids within fullness.
Jenik’s often-outsized loops and calligraphic like segments
careen and hover inside the picture planes of brightly colored
grounds. She suggests, metaphorically, that there is a range of
metaphysical musings on time and space which is induced by her
mark-making and coloristic adventures; additionally emotionally
expansive readings and psychologically dense inferences are also read
through the renderings of form, color and space.
Jenik’s abstractions, comprised in part of the basic expressive unit of
gestural abstraction: the painterly mark of the brushstroke against
brightly saturated colors, create luminous high-voltage pictorial
fields of stunning grace and amplitude. Her works remind us of the
philosopher Shelling’s comment that art was the resolution of an
infinite contradiction in a finite object. And how true this is of
Jenik’s artwork. Here intensity and relaxedness, accident and design,
speed and quietude, the infinite grandeur of small spaces, the
expressively random pattern-making --- all points of contrast and
contradiction co-exist gracefully and, seemingly, naturally.
Jenik’s achievement in her body of work is to have arrived at a point
in her mastery to create works that are not only pictorially engaging
on formal levels but to create, also, philosophically teasing and
profound images. Artist’s visionary visual exaltations refer to the
enigmatic presence of lived life, aware of itself and of its
limitations, yet pressing on and filled with a sense of exultation at
infinite possibilities. This vision is a fine legacy for us as viewers
to bask in.
D.F. Colman is an arts writer residing in Manhattan. |
EDUCATION
Studies with Hossein Delrish, Iran
Studies with Barbara Lae, Scotland
1981-1987 Studies with Chalita Robinson, U.S.
Studies with Jake Lee, U.S.
1990-1994 Studies with Dr. Alex Vilumsons, U.S.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2009
Southen Nevada Museum, Las Vegas, NV
ASTO Museum of Art
Fine Good Gallery, LA, CA
Burnsdall Municipal Art Gallery
Seyhoun Gallery, LA, CA
Iranian Art Association, LA, CA
New Art Center, New York, NY
Florence Biennele, Florence, Itlay
Martin Luther King, Human Rights Award
Burbank Creative Art Center, Burbank, CA
2008
Seyhoun gallery, LA
Southern Navada Museum
New Art Center, NY
Gallery P Las Vegas
Beatrice Wood Gallery
Gallery P Las Vegas. NV
2007
Seyhoun Gallery, LA, CA
Gallery P, Las Vegas, NV
2004
The Schacknow Museum of Fine Arts , Plantation, FL
New Art Center, New York, NY
2002
Orlando Gallery, LA, CA
FDG Gallery, LA, CA
BGH Gallery, LA, CA
2001
Orlando Gallery, LA, CA
Z Mart Galleria, LA, CA
2000
Orlando Gallery, Orlando, FL
Post Logic Studio, LA, CA
1999
Art 21 Las Vegas, NV
1997
Orlando Gallery, Orlando, FL
1995
Orlando Gallery Sherman Oaks, CA
1988
Orlando Gallery-solo show, Sherman Oaks, CA
1981
Betty Hay Gallery, Bakersfield, CA
1979
Petroleum Womanís Club, Aberdeen, Scotland
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2009
New Art Center, New York, NY
Southern Nevada Art Museum, Las Vegas, NV
Fine Good Gallery, LA, CA
L.A Municipal Gallery, LA, CA
2008
New Art Center Group show
Beatrice Wood Center, LA, CA
Anita Hamlin Gallery, LA, CA
New Art Center, New York, NY
2007
Bergdorf Goodman, New York, NY
Award: Micheal Angelo Award 2006
2005
New Art Center, New York, NY
Gallery P Las Vegas
Seyhoun Gallery
2004
New Art Center, New York, NY
2003
Galleria Centro Storico, Florence, Italy
Noho Gallery, LA, CA
Infusion Gallery, LA, CA
The Schacknow Museum of Fine Arts, Plantation, FL
2002
CSUN Art Galleries, North Ridge, CA
2001
Latin American Museum, Coral Gables, FL
Artesanos, Coral Gables, FL
2000
Long Beach Art Abstract Show, LA, CA
Art 21, Las Vegas, NV
1988
Gallery Merkel, Germany
1995
Art Space Gallery, Sherman Oaks, CA
1993
ìCalifornia Color,î traveling exhibition Badsackingen, Germany
Fine Arts Pavilion Gallery, LA, CA
1992
L.A. Art Gallery, Encino, CA
1990
Valley Watercolor Society, LA, CA
1989
Los Angeles Contemporary Galleries, Los Angeles, CA
1986
Cunnungham Art Gallery, Bakersfield, CA
AWARDS
2004
International Visual artist of the year IBC, Cambridge, England
2003
Manhattan Arts international: Award of excellence 'The healing power
of Arts' competetion
Premio Alba Artistic achievement
American Hall of fame
Premio Oscar Della Culture
AWARDS:
Micheal Angelo Award 2006,
The Leonardo Da Vinchi Award.
The Martin Luther King award
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