Tim Biskup's Jackson 500 series is a fine showcase of Biskup's comic-book understanding, but does he straddle the world of the comic-book and fine art? His publicity quickly defines him as a 'fine-artist', which would be grouping him with Vincent Van Gogh, Picasso, and Henri Matisse, but is this necessary? Is this a marketting ploy to sell Biskup's work to a audience of 'higher society'? Why saddle him with monikers? The question which is vital to Biskup's work is, why classify him? Perhaps we should judge the merits of his art without the added verbiage.
What constitutes a fine artist or a comic book artist? Clearly two very different things, although both valuable in their own rights. A comic book artist needs a sense of the dynamic, of the immediate, he/she needs a strong sense of composition, color, and balance, and needs to allude to a narrative within the image. The fine artist needs to accomplish all those things but requires a subtlety that arrives from careful observation and quiet understanding. It is only when the comic book artist arrives at this subtlety that he/she is capable of producing fine art.
Is Biskup's 'Jackson 500' series alluding to the work of Jackson Pollock? If so, although it is in good spirit, it resolves pretentiously since it holds only a fleeting resemblance to the work of the Abstract Expressionist. Jackson Pollock was an artist who pioneered a liberation from stuffy art of the pre-World War II period. After the War Mark Rothko, an Abstract Expressionist, stated “...none of us could use the figure without mutilating it.” So the art of this new generation would be abstract and relating only to the inner experience of the human soul. Jackson Pollock is the foremost painter of this group for creating expansive works with a simple technique never before considered artistic, splatting paint, and rendering it into complex works of fine art with a piercing subtlety. Although Biskup is using the free-association of the inner muse, brought out in Pollock by the theories of Carl Jung, his work only casually brushes over the mandate of Abstract Expressionism.
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His use of demons, monsters, eyes, tear-drops, stars, fires, skulls, and other symbols, has some resemblance to Pollock's psycho-analytic notebooks but the association is a forced one. Biskup is creating imaginary worlds that arrive from the consumption of video-games, comic-books, animated movies, horror flicks, and action movies. His colors are more akin to Hanah Barbarah and the Flintstones than to the tormented Pollock. Yet, Biskup is a talented artist in his own field. His use of techniques learned from his time in animation pervade the bouncy lives of his little creations. There is an attractive element to his works in that they are unusual and off-the-wall, not because they shed any glimpse onto the suffering of humanity. If anything they are celebratory of our world of commodities. |
Although Biskup might not communicate fine-art with his comic creations, he is enjoyable and attractive. To do what he does takes an effort in understanding joy. Even Biskup's darker creations carry a weightless quality that makes them veiwable. Ignore the claims of his “boroque modernism” and enjoy the interplay of complimentary colours and designs echoing nostolgia, for why classify an artist who may be unclassifiable?
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