Zohar Lazar has exhibited his paintings and drawings at The Jewish Museum, Sara Meltzer Gallery, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Morgan Lehman Gallery, Andrea Meislin Gallery, Geoffrey Young Gallery, Hudson Opera House, Bernay Fine Art, and LABspace. He has also contributed illustrations and comics work to The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Wired, The Atlantic, Apple, Microsoft, and Fantagraphics. Lazar lives and works in Great Barrington, MA.
Zohar Lazar writes:
My work is most informed by the cartoons I consumed as a child. I loved their use of violence and misfortune for a laugh. Innocent schmoes blindsided by the horrors that befell them felt like animal versions of the people around me. For my purposes, it is the ideal visual language for its light touch with subjects that might otherwise feel self-serious or overly morbid. A rotating cast of characters are deployed to act out the scenes and daydreams of my youth.
Speedy calligraphic lines and passages of bright, flat color are used to evoke the pop sensibility of comics and children’s book illustration. Watercolor and acrylic applied in thin brushy washes are deployed with the graphic punch informed by artists like Tomi Ungerer, Gladys Nilsson and Ludwig Bemelmans.
A more austere style appears in reference to slick album cover art. Depictions of ecstatic motion are achieved through the geometric abstractions loosely informed by Italian Futurist painting or Art Deco illustrations found on early New Yorker covers. Hipgnosis music industry graphics, with their free-looting from art history, lends a guiding hand in leapfrogging from style to style. Whiffs of Karl Wirsum and John Wesley's pristine surfaces are deployed when a more devotional message is called for. The paintings freely slip between styles like my characters’ desires to slip into the worlds they imagine.
Deploying different styles is a method I have readily used as a commercial artist. It’s an efficient shortcut for viewers to enter my work, equipped with their own art historical knowledge and inferences. Stylistic hopscotch serves several purposes. Pragmatically, it keeps me interested in different materials and techniques. Exercising a variety of visual styles also allows me to stay engaged in the task of image-making without getting overly bogged down by its content. I can surrender authorship and get lost in the act of making. This approach is informed by the punk ethos of my youth (as I understood it).
The UTOPIA PKWY images are dominated by a longhaired punk in torn jeans and chuck taylors stumbling through 1980s Queens, NY. He seeks refuge from his home-life in the natural world. An unheard classic rock and punk soundtrack accompanies our guy on his lonely excursions. We witness him quietly musing or violently crashing through his days. At times he wishes for a canine companion or dreams of being a dog himself. He believes he can talk to the animals and listen to the trees. He’s quietly inventing a spiritual practice, complete with ritual and wonder. These paintings are a tribute to teenage isolation and boredom.
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