Jasper Zoova was born in 1975. He works in field of graphics, animation, performance, sculpture, video, photo, installation and stage design. From 2006 Jasper Zoova lives and works in Estonian Summer Capital Pärnu.
The sweet popglam of Zoova’s drawings might repel some people, or is not acceptable due to the subject matter, the way he draws is free of the clichés characteristic to Estonian graphic art or drawing tradition. The need to comply with the conceptions and characters in comics and animations is considerably more relevant than the wish to draw a beautiful impressive picture. Zoova uses the dynamic visual language of animation to interpret the stories meaningful for him in the most impressive and straightforward way possible.
At the same time the author surprises with sustainability of the innovative thought of art and it is possible to compare the accomplishment to rope-walking, where the acrobat combines alternativeness with the achievements of hedonistic soft-culture. The audience will not get the ‘salto mortale’, instead of a tragedy Zoova describes an endless carnival.
Lets play that I am the Hammer and Sickle and you are the Swastikas.
Jennifer the Dollwoman
I hold the book on my lap while writing this. All the time. A yellow book of drawings, with large capital letters stating the authors name and minuscule shrift referring to the five series included – “:”, “Parallel Euro”, “The Barricades of Love”, “Journey to Idontknowland” and “Multidreams”.
In a way the five chapters of the book summon up the idiosyncratic twist in Zoova’s oeuvre since 2001 up to nowdays, working both as collected works, parallel routes to his animations and as a short guide to whatever might be coming. Every once and a while I glimpse into this labyrinth of inventive images, hybrid characters, nervous fragments, beat-broken pictorial systems, chaotic mandalas and quite a few absurd situations referring to Zoova’s earlier performances – now all reduced to rigid black and white contrasts of ball-point-pen drawings and multiplied into series vaguely promising comics-like narration. And every time I lay the book aside again I am greeted by a funny figure of a boy on a front cover, one of the multiplied Zoovas’ of the book, an alter ego perhaps, with square eyes and hands raised up to a chakra-like position, pointing to a little town growing out of his head, uniting pyramid sky-scrapers and minuscule tents, I cannot help having an idiotic notion of “the global village gone cuckoo” popping up in my head. All the rude-boys, cheery clowns and cheeky chicks of the book seemingly disagreeing with this statement in their anarchic march after the jolly puppet beats. But I cannot help it. My journey to Idontknowland has began.
In his “Research – Whimsical Manoeuvres”, a kind of foreword to the book, but actually more like a closure, an umbrella or a roof to the series, Zoova presents us with a set of five characters, with “aliens from psychedelic subculture” childishly moving around in a fairy-tale like environment with names like self-transforming micro-adventures; Jennifer the Dollwoman with Heartshaped Face in Worn Dress with Big Polka Dots, Patric the Turtle, Adidas the Benign Tumor, Manager the Depressingly Thin Contriver and Daalia the Slanting Princess. Thumbing through the drawing series it nevertheless occurs that these decorous names are more about principles of proliferation, adaptability and ability to transform endlessly hidden in the manner Zoova’s prolific drawingsare carried out. New characters are popping up constantly, nevertheless showing immediate individuation. The names are illustratively graphic and as in real drawings they demonstrate capability to mutate according to the compositional logic into whatever new characters we are willing and able to trace, find out, recognize and play along with. The foreword is a key indeed, but not a semantic or a cryptic one revealing and fixing the meanings of the above mentioned characters, but more like a musical one, fixing the playful nature of whatever identities in play in transformations and whatever situations the characters might face in the micro-utopias by Zoova.
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And micro-utopias they are, often aiming to describe the parallel micro-universe of yin and yang banks, directors of universe, dwarfed dinosaurs or dragons of worldwide doctrins and intertwining systems of houses and bodies. The mixture of seemingly colliding symbolic systems are here continuously rebuilt by shifting angles of apprehension – logos and symbols turned topsy-turvy, acquiring animalistic features and blending into each other show no apparent contradictions between each other. As silhouettes ofhouses passing by turn into nervous heartbeat of an electrocardiogram ants playing with memory chrystals form an instant pentagram. Multiple ways to satisfaction in “The Barricades of Love” in a way embrace the hedonism of endless speeches by the President of Parallel Euro giving birth to mountains of cake and candy. And the characters seem self-fulfilled, self-satisfactory exactly due to the ability of forming micor-universes around themselves instantly and with such an ease. Yes, each man is an island in Zoova’s world!
Hanno Soans, born in 1974 is a freelance art critic based in Tallinn, Estonia. He has worked in journalism, editing art pages (at Sirp, Kultuurimaa and Võitlev sõna) and as a curator in KUMU, the art museum of Estonia.
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Daalia the Slanting Princess Estonia Jennifer the Dollwoman micro-utopias Multidreams Pärnu popglam Tallinn The Barricades of Love
I am in complete love with your work, and I’m high right now…lol
