One complaint that skeptics often level at digital imagery is its lack of passion. Not so for St. Petersburg artist Jack Breit. His technologically mediated images transform nostalgic icons and signature tongue-in-cheek content into energetic contemporary Surrealism that's overlaid with sizzling color. Breit's surrealism is distant from the classic version born of literary origins or figures acting out the stuff of dreams. His composites are mostly generated by a stimulus/response method rather than from preconceived ideas. This means adding images one at a time until each environment looks just right.
His scenarios illustrate what he calls mindscapes (as opposed to landscapes). To achieve this, he chooses images from his own storehouse of photos and manipulates them within the computer. With the click of an arrow, he bathes images with paint or other textures.
With 32 works, Jack Breit: You Really Don't Know Jack, is another Salt Creek winner. The few missteps result from the artist reacting to images rather than following his visual instincts.
The masterfully composed "Bird Legs," representing Breit's interest in ceremonial dollhouses, is one of the more intriguing images I've seen recently. Surrealist illogical space becomes a plausible reality and filled with a virtual smorgasbord of scanned images. They include side walls from the Sistine Chapel, one wall constructed from framing scraps Breit hoards and uses liberally (courtesy of Salt Creek's Ambiance Framing), and an ethnic mask topping a long-legged figure, the result of digitally repeating the artist's handmade broomstick, and on the floor, brilliant blue Spanish tiles.
Breit's photographs, generally in color, also include a Chinese palace, Portuguese dogs, Lowry Park carousel dragons, exotic flowers and, acknowledging the pop cultural pack, wife Lisa's Barbie dolls. No image escapes the artist's scrutiny for future use.
But computer wizardry aside, we have myriad reasons to admire this art maverick who cares not a hoot about trend, style or art history. And why should he, with collectors like famed art critic Robert Hughes and art historian Barbara Rose and credits in Art in America and Art News? But he does care about the viewer's eye. Calling himself a "visual evangelist," he is passionate about "turning people on to aesthetics."
Yet process is equally important to Breit's preoccupation with how things should look. This mindset also represents an escape route for a number of local artists immersed in pop culture imagery but who share images as if they were part of a visual co-op. Despite honest intentions, their work regurgitates the world around them, runs together like a muddy stream, and in the end offers too little to think about.
Breit's art, on the other hand, is individual and identifiable because he adds or subtracts disparate elements drawn from his own cache of photos liberally saturated with color.
Inevitably Breit's photo/digital process must be compared with legendary photographer/photomontage innovator Jerry Uelsmann, whose haunting black-and-white images, products of dark-room alteration, offer a lyrical worldview. But for Breit, viewers need to emulate archaeologists and "lightly dust layers away and see what you bring to it."
What this artist brings is passion wed to technology.
Adrienne M. Golub can be reached by e-mail at adrienne.golub@weeklyplanet.com.Jack Breit:
This article appears in May 8-14, 2002.