Roberto Azank

"Overall, Azank's work reminds us of a chromatic Mozart. In fact, much like Mozart's chamber music, these still lifes of bottles, flowers, branches, candles, glass, and bread, carefully and fastidiously arranged and crafted on a plane of spacious and desolate beauty, convey a world of perfect formal harmony; and like in Mozart's music, we find the same elegance and eloquence of line, the same simplicity of composition and innocuous unpretentious honesty. It was this simplicity of composition, entirely devoid of ornaments or embellishments-classical in essence-that made me appreciate all the more the spirit of Azank's work; powerful, but certainly passionate in its use of bold and saturated colors, fervid but contained, brimming with thought and with a stern and yet undeniable human character. In fact, one might say that Azank does not paint still lifes but rather portraits of non-living objects.

 

Still Life 77 of a bottle exemplifies this condition. Here we see a sensuous, curvaceous bottle painted in a bold dark green. The bottle, larger than life in scale, wears a rope. The rope and its candle cork keep it dressed, and more importantly, contained. The desolate bi-planar background with its foreboding, ascetic colors, serves to intensify this soliloquy at center stage; it also heightens the scale of this larger than life character. The light from the candle enhances the drama by producing a robust shadow and subtle shades of light and dark. The interplay between the two-dimensional background and the three-dimensional rope and wax heighten the overall presence of the bottle which at times seems to express sheer pathos in its reclusive loneliness. God help us when the candle consumes itself! The overall feeling leads us to believe that this is a portrait of a bottle and not a still life."

from The Metaclassical Style of Roberto Azank by Dr. Ronald Vigo, 1998