A Painter Who Looks Beneath the Surface

Little of what Peter Zokosky paints is remarkable, and yet it is all remarkable. Familiarity breeds no contempt in his images of cows, plants, humans, clouds and sea creatures but instead evokes curiosity, wonder, respect. It’s a matter of perception, the Long Beach painter suggests, a matter of looking at the surface of the world and beyond, and crediting both realities as equally true and accurate.

Zokosky, whose work is on view at the Felicita Foundation Gallery (247 S. Kalmia, Escondido), states the case fairly plainly in his painting, “Seeing Cows.” Five of the bovine beasts, serene and self-content, stand in profile on a gently rolling green pasture. One of the cows is painted in a traditional, naturalistic style, a faithful representation of the animal’s size, shape and surface as seen by the naked eye. Another, however, is a mere skeleton, and another an anatomical cross-section of muscles and bones. Another view forgoes the pattern of pelt to map the cow’s digestive tract. The last exists only in outline, as a crude, bullet-shaped mass with straight-as-stick legs like those drawn by a child.

However different these views, they all represent cows. Each definition is as valid as the next and they coexist, comfortably. This, perhaps, is the “Legitimate Paradox” referred to in the show’s title. What we see casually, with unquestioning eyes, is coupled in Zokosky’s paintings with visions of submerged realities, hidden systems and latent mysteries. The natural world assumes a fascinating, fluid identity when these ordinarily concealed facets are brought to the surface to mingle with more familiar aspects of the same subjects. By paying as much attention to the unseen as to the seen, Zokosky sharpens our awareness of the layered quality of life, the multiple readings possible of any subject or situation.

In “Gardening,” the artist exposes the botanical and biological processes at work while a couple tends to their back yard, thereby transforming the mundane suburban scene into a narrative rich with sexual symbolism. In the pair’s well-kept garden, manicured shrubs stand in a neat row before a masonry brick wall and a sapling stands on the lawn with the help of a supporting stake. The woman waters the grass with a hose and the man stands across from her, pausing from his work with a hoe.

The predictability of the scene dissipates in the details. Zokosky shifts the perspective beneath the couple’s feet and renders the earth below in cross-section, revealing the fine, shallow roots of the grass, the deeper, more complex root system of the young tree, the numerous rocks embedded in the dirt and the worm channels winding through it. The woman’s short skirt bears a pattern that seems abstract, but actually diagrams her reproductive system. Her pairing with the sinuous lines and nourishing function of the hose confirms her sexual role, as does her mate’s prop of a straight, solid hoe.

Zokosky turns the familiar inside out again in “Skeleton and Goat” and in the diptych, “Hare and Hare After.” Each work shows two views of its subject, one an accurate rendering of the animal’s texture and mass, the other of its skeletal or muscular system. In “One, Two, Three,” Zokosky shows what the unaided eye can see, but cannot seize--the individual movements that merge to form continuous motion. Here, a single gray dog is seen simultaneously at three different stages of a backward flip. Like the pioneering, stop-action photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, Zokosky’s painting fragments a single action, allowing slow scrutiny of a split-second sight.

While many of Zokosky’s works give access to the visually inaccessible, others elevate the known to the status of the revered through an elegant painting style of rich color and radiant light, as in “Serpent” and “Gibbons in the Trees.” The artist’s unpopulated landscapes are far less mesmerizing. They lack both the punning humor and the odd, revelatory character of the animal paintings.

“Gentleman” is, perhaps, the oddest and most disturbing of all, for it introduces the notion that man is not only blind to much of the natural world, but also manipulative, patronizing and possessive of it.

In this painting, a young woman sits at the base of a tree, as if engaged in a lesson with the gorilla seated opposite her on a small folding stool. She holds up a panel with a picture of a man; two other panels, depicting an antelope and an Oreo cookie, lay beside her on the jungle floor.

This curious scene caricatures our insistence on relating to the non-human world in strictly human terms. The beauty and mystery so abundant in that world, and so well articulated in Zokosky’s paintings, would seem to cast us better in the role of student than teacher.

The show continues through March 3.