BALINT ZSAKO and MICAH LEXIER at the Drake Sky Yard (1150 Queen West), to September 30. 416-531-4052. Rating: NNNN
The Drake inaugurates summer in the Sky Yard with two brand new murals by Balint Zsako and Micah Lexier that pit exuberant playfulness against exacting conceptualism. Together, both up-and-coming Toronto artists carry on an interesting dialogue across one of Toronto’s most active rooftop patios.
[rssbreak]
Zsako’s mural, called Untitled (Romance), catches the artist at his most whimsically perverse, with women and men sprouting, flowering, melding or transmuting into each other according to a primal dream logic that’s pointedly sexual and mythological.
If you allow your mind to drift, you can follow Zsako’s gleefully polymorphous narrative and come up with some very interesting questions for your friends around the table. Why is the woman lactating into the fishbowl being held aloft by two flying birds while merging into the standing man whose capillaries have started to glow? Why is the woman who has sprouted magnificently into a tree hosting brightly coloured birds proffering a flower to one man while placing a cork in the bottle held by another? Mysteries abound.
While Zsako’s mural serves as an endless conversation starter, Lexier provides an excellent decision-maker on the opposite wall in his pointed and icy either/or. The options Yes and No appear in a large no-nonsense font, with a large red check mark on the Yes side. As a conceptual work, it’s less about the sleek visual than about affecting viewers.
I imagine Lexier is hoping his mural will offer revellers a positive incentive to embrace all of summer’s possibilities. This season, the answer is always yes.
art@nowtoronto.com
