How would you e-mail a Martian? I raised the question in the '80's, at the founding meeting for an artists' group called WorldPool. Avalanche Magazine publisher Willoughby Sharp had called the gathering to consider global implications for artists of emerging technologies such as the FAX/modem. After listening to each person give a five minute spiel on their life, Sharp asked us all to say what we were looking for out of the group. My response: contact with artists from other planets.

Fast forward: We're in the era of the World Wide Web (shades of WorldPool) and instantaneous wired communication. But where are these artist/aliens? They must be desperate by now to get into an on-line chat-group. No contact. Planets Bosnia and Kosovo, dark stars Rwanda, Uganda and Eritrea, arid moon Sudan and the constellation of ex-Soviet republics are silent. Or their artists are more familiar with automatic weapons' communication than with e-mail. For we happy artists of the west, they're still in outer space.

Of course, what I want is for our culture to be made strange— to see through alien eyes. Sadko Hadzihasanovic immigrated from Bosnia some years ago, and has readily integrated into the scene here. Yet his ongoing work project has been to re-envision his present surroundings, precisely to make them strange. He brings a set of painterly skills long foreign to these parts: modelling, glazing, scumbling, gold-leafing (traditional to pre-Renaissance painting and still ongoing in ex-Yugoslavia). But the delirious and ubiquitous strangeness he locates is in media and advertising, our primary culture. Its system of signs, so keyed to North Americans' responses, is a fascinating metalanguage, solipsistic, comprehensible from within the loop, potentially quite opaque to anyone outside.

Take People Magazine. Any regular TV-watcher in Toronto could identify the subject of each week's cover at a glance, and fill in the story's basic outlines without cracking the book. Mass murderer or presidential concubine, one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world or murder victim: each one gazes dramatically out of a glossy pool, static as an icon. These icons hold a wild power over us, in spite of our roots in Protestant iconoclasm: they're faces of moral turpitude, faces of success and redemption. Sadko has discovered a cultural anomaly here, and adroitly spins it in his People paintings.

He knows the characteristics of icons well, having grown up amongst them. In their hieratic form, they're 'audile-tactile' (McLuhan), meaning surrounded by church liturgy and touched by the congregation. Likewise, People Magazine exists in television's auditory space, and its glossy pages invite handling. But how do you transpose a magazine onto canvas, with all painting's historical baggage of spatial illusion, and still make it iconic? True, Sadko's art comes from a tradition that never fully conceded 3-dimensional space to painting. But anyway, in these paintings he is the iconoclast. He shatters the cover's devotional rectangularity, and in assaulting our holy, secular icons, gives a jolt to some shopworn visages.

The faces he paints are masks (the important exception being his own). But they're not impassive— each is expressive of a particular narrative. Jon—Benet Ramsay, the young murder victim, has the animated look of an excited child, in spite of the heavy make-up on her eyes and mouth. On her hairline, Sadko subtly separates the naked skull from her big, blond mop (a wig?) that ages the girl prematurely. He divides her face below from the overall image being constructed through it, so recuperating her youth as well as the closeness of her death. The hairline mediates between face and image, faintly but eloquently evoking a death's head in the childish demeanour.

Jennifer Anniston and Gwyneth Paltrow are as silky and sylphlike as Ingres' nudes, but their faces are also construction sites, scribbled over and annotated, interrupted by various markings and collages. In another painting, a child/killer points his rifle into the 'People' logo, smiling like Elmer Fudd or a botched Norman Rockwell, his antic malice made visible and palpable.

Only the artist's own physiognomy gets three dimensional treatment over the famous logo. He comments gesturally— picking his nose against flowered wallpaper‹ on the format, leaving no ambiguity about where he stands. This work isn't formalism or political rhetoric: it's a hard, editorial view of our culture of celebrity. It's painted with breezy panache, snatches of comedy and an insistence on standing outside the terms of reference, as it rediscovers meaning possibilities in the public faces that surround us.

Oliver Girling
June, 1998