art

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Drunken Santa
(oil painting by Jaisini)

Drunken Santa is a work that creates a miracle of equilibrium. What seemed 
like a clash of an opposite spectrum's colors became the unlikely harmony in 
this painting. Jaisini's artistic vision here is formed from two components 
of physical and emotional states of being.
Freezing and heating serve as a symbol to a human need for warming up from 
the chill of solitude by means known to people at all times. The artist 
pursues his art philosophical quest for worldly knowledge that had left its 
traces in many of his works. A line of composition literally ignites the 
painting's surface with the movement. The color of this work is 
"phosphorescent," and it create the different planes if the subtle color 
nature. The warm color of purple supports the hot color of Santa's figure and 
an exotic fish above Santa. This hot color may represent the so-called 
material universe, the world of the gross senses that can be observed in a 
sober state. The cold, arctic blue color represents the unknown, the world of 
a deep state of drunkenness where real is unreal and otherwise. The only hard 
reality is the self, which never changes in any state. And maybe that is why 
Jaisini favors the painting's main hero, Santa, to possess the vivacious 
color of fire. Jaisini chooses this color of fire to manifest the self and 
the cold cerulean, cobalt and ultramarine to renounce self as a mortal entity 
surrounded by the eternal unknown.
        While Santa drinks his feelings of frigid loneliness vanish. And so, 
he gets a company of some almost hallucinatory nature. A shark, a ghostly 
image, a profile of another prototypical drunk who is not accidentally 
situated in a horizontal position. An amalgam of the several female figures 
that consists of a woman in stockings, a nun, a big-breasted silhouette that 
create a shadow between.
        A  heat can be sensed around the hot colored Santa who has lost his 
beard and is holding a glass of red wine. He shows his thumb that may be just 
a polite substitution for the middle finger sign.
        The colors of the work are balanced by a virtuoso composition of a 
cubist character. The picture's space is divided endlessly. More images start 
to appear. The world of "Drunken Santa" vitalizes to almost chaotic state. 
The work is a treasure. It depicts and witnesses the intangible mechanism of 
reality transformation. In the state of intoxication, what happens to the 
solid world of sober state? Everything disappears. It is just like the 
dream-world, that we call unreal, because when we are awaken it is not there. 
Just so the solid world must be unreal because it also vanishes in the drunk 
or deep-sleep states. Then what is reality? In "Drunken Santa," this problem 
is elaborated to the triumphant conclusion. The simplicity of symbolism of 
the warm and cold colors. The dazzling composition of figuration superimposed 
to abstraction. And besides the beauty of artistic logic, Jaisini's works are 
marked with the rich, magnetic colors, as in "Drunken Santa" and others, 
strikingly attractive pictures in their intricate game of light and shadow, 
in their absolute congruence of visual and conceptual.

Review of oil painting "Drunken Santa" by Paul Jaisini 
Text copyrights by Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb
All rights reserved
New York, 1999
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