Fabuvalia

Kenny Scharf’s Fabuvalia shows the artist at a personal climacteric, depicting themes and forms he had previously developed in a self-referential synthesis which communicates in a more restrained and surrealistic semantic than his more visually exuberant canvases from the 1980s. An ovular vertical yellow form with green shadow floats in the center of the canvas, existing in a nebulous space devoid of gravity, extant in nothingness. Flanked on either side by perfect yellow-green spheres and tailed with circular pins with pointed bases, this monochrome group establish the fundamental balance and equilibrium of the composition, emphasizing the center while establishing an optimistic, cheerful, and colorful energy which pulses through Scharf’s works. The vibrant red forms—the two convex loops which secure and stabilize the yellow-green orbs, and the four bulbous stacked forms on the top and bottom edge of the picture pane—complement the central grouping in bother color and form, anchoring the tableau to an unspecified yet certain space.

The central form is a mandala shape, which appears often throughout Scharf’s oeuvre and is central to the artist’s iconography. Mandalas have been used from the earliest religious imagery across diverse cultures to symbolize the universe. In Scharf’s The Jetsonism Manifesto (1981), he writes that “Religion is strong. Mandalas are used in all religions. They have a center. They can bring you to a higher level” (K. Scharf, The Jetsonism Manifesto, 1981, in N. Phillips, “A Nuclear Rapture: The Apocalyptic Art of Kenny Scharf, 2013, Religion and the Arts Vol. 17, 82). His earliest use of mandalas were informed by the religious history of this symbol, but infused as well with an apocalyptic anxiety concerning nuclear Armageddon.

This mandala is threatened by the four black angular, pointed spade-shaped forms entering the canvas from each corner. Trailed by black spheres with swirling chemtrails, these forms alone are given a sense of movement through space, while the top-left form is almost at a point of rupture with the mandala. The tension between these black forms and the central yellow grouping is essential to Scharf’s artistic philosophy; the art historian and curator Richard D. Marshall writes that “[Scharf’s] work is optimistic and exuberant, and the canvases scream with biomorphic delight, threatened only by the evil, geometric faces that upset the balance of a fun environment” (R. Marshall, “The Fun’s Inside: The Paintings of Kenny Scharf,” in Kenny Scharf (New York: Rizzoli, 2009), 103).

After the tragic deaths of his close friends Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Scharf’s work expanded from the colorful, zany fun encapsulated in his installation for the 1985 Whitney Biennial toward more moralistic themes. Several trips to Brazil, where he witnessed the destructive impact mankind was ravaging upon the Amazon Rainforest, urged him into environmental activism, establishing the Don’t Bungle the Jungle benefit in 1989, raising more than $1 million for charity, and painting a series of realistic landscapes for a 1994 exhibition which present a lush, tropical forest untouched by the Anthropocene. Describing these paintings, Scharf said “Even some of my early paintings dealt with nature, the conflict between man and nature, man being the evil one and nature the good one, for the pieces of my show, I presented nature in a pristine condition, without the encumbrance of man, except for the frames. The Frames are the multi-layered Pop media imagery, which represents man. The frame literally encroaches on the untouched nature” (K. Scharf, quoted in op. cit., 166).

Creating Fabuvalia just one year later, Scharf returns to this environmental theme, returning to a surrealist style where the central mandala and surrounding forms represent a pulsing, pure nature, while the intruding black forms, anthropomorphized with narrowed eyes and intimidating grimaces, embody humanity’s threat to this natural harmony, evoking the communicative forms employed by Supremacists such as El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919). In the present lot, Scharf elegantly conveys his recurring theme of environmental destruction through a visual language, amalgamating his own persistent motifs within a canvas impugned with surrealist and supremacist rhetoric, all suspended within his trademark nebulous space.