Pop subconscious
Michael Sarich: Seemingly superficial images demand a second look
By Victoria Dalkey - Bee Art Correspondent

Mickey Mouse, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Smiley Face -- cultural icons that have become visual clichés -- simultaneously invite and repel you from Michael Sarich's work at Jayjay. At first glance, they make Sarich's work look superficial and a bit passé -- pop art past its time. But as you look closer, the works open up into multilayered images that belie their initial simplicity with complexity, ambiguity and irony.

Sarich, who is a professor of art at the University of Nevada, Reno, writes that he was born on the day Disneyland opened but, being a native of Chicago, never set foot on any Disneyland properties. He describes Mickey Mouse, with whom he has a love-hate relationship, as a visual hook into his work. Perhaps that ambivalent attitude explains why the white-gloved mouse gives a cheerful wave in some of Sarich's images while devolving into a menacing, skull-like rodent in others.

Equally at home with painting, drawing and ceramic sculpture, Sarich adds personal symbolism -- simplified cathedrals, fish, birds, beach balls and propellers -- to his works, creating enigmatic narratives that communicate from his subconscious to ours.

Mixing humor and horror, he gives us "Let Go of My Lucky Charm," a charcoal and mixed-media work in which a kelly-green propeller that resembles a four-leaf-clover bears screaming heads. The clover rides on a dark sea where ghostly images of birds, skulls, scars, a boat and Mickey float in and out like dreams or memories.

In "Rise," a ceramic sculpture, Mickey turns into a surprised skull with a red eye and a red cross on one ear. Walking around the piece, you find a childlike drawing of a church on wheels on the other side. A dingy, somehow scared, happy face adorns one ear while the other morphs into a nest full of eggs. The symbolism is hermetic but the emotions -- fear and fragility -- are palpable.

Sarich's work is confrontational, full of savage anger and black humor, but there is an underlying pathos that runs through the work, perhaps reflective of his struggle with Parkinson's disease. Diagnosed in 2000, he continues to work at full pace and power in spite of the increasing toll the disease takes on his body.

Looking at such works as the large canvas "Cluster," in which a black propeller is flanked by red fish heads, one senses no deterioration in his technique or vision. The powerful diptych, which also includes images of clusters of cells and a gloved mouse hand with stigmata, can be read as a metaphor for the maelstrom he is caught up in.

Images of death and suffering coexist with symbols of birth and regeneration in this and many of his works, including "Pluck," in which Smiley Face shines like a full moon with a Day of the Dead skull underneath.

Hope and despair mingle in "Juggle," an image of a giant death's head surrounded by Mickey, a sexy devil girl, a beachball and a bird, and in "7-10 Pickup," a large ceramic sculpture with a four-eyed Mickey, clusters of cells and the Virgin of Guadalupe. It is an elaboration on "7-10 Split" which, like some of Sarich's mouse heads, suggests a bowling pin, and whose title evokes the notion of bowling for hope.

Sarich's works -- both paintings and sculptures -- have a richness of texture and touch, mixing illusionistic images and expressionistic passages with naively drawn symbols and sophisticated, technologically derived images.

Sarich's pop and personal symbols mingle with raw, graffitilike markings, abstract expressionist drips and photographic images reduced to thick black and white marks that sometimes resemble the whorls of fingerprints in a rich soup of opposing ideas and aesthetic styles.

At bottom, his works, which examine nature and culture, dream and memory, good and evil, raise more questions than they answer. Like all serious art, they confront us with provocative visual, intellectual and spiritual puzzles, and reward us with the time we spend pondering them.

Michael Sarich Paintings, Ceramics, and Works on Paper
WHEN: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, through Feb. 24
WHERE: Jayjay, 5520 Elvas Ave.
ADMISSION: Free
INFORMATION: (916) 453-2999, www.jayjayart.com