Out of Violence, Victory

To the tune of a commercial for a noted detergent, Jack Zajac of Claremont. Calif., lightheartedly identifies himself as "Zajac the foaming sculptor," but behind the punning and affability of the man is an artistry that is anything but froth. At 33, Sculptor-Painter Zajac has already produced a body of work as profound as that of almost any other American of his age.

In his new exhibition at Los Angeles' Felix Landau Gallery, he shows battered rams' heads, writhing rams' horns, trussed-up goats, a series of pieces depicting the deposition from the cross. Visually, the sculptures are violent and brutal, but the emotion they arouse is a sense of tragedy and triumph combined. As images, they go back to man's earliest history, yet their vigor is ageless. Zajac uses a religious iconography because he feels that this alone is adequate to express "the complete cycle of man's experience."

The most famous of his themes is the sacrificial goat, sometimes tied to a stake, sometimes merely bound. He first saw such goats when traveling through Spain, and to him, "the whole slaughter seemed like a strange remnant of the Passion." The ram image came to him by accident when, squeezing a ball of soft wax, he saw how it oozed through his fingers, seemed to form spiral horns. The rams' horns in Zajac's sculpture are usually broken, yet the sweep of the horn -- in itself one of nature's most graceful images-- is unimpaired. The impression that Zajac is after is "damage, but not defeat. I want the rams to seem triumphant."

In his human figures, whether painted or sculpted, the faces are either obscured or hidden completely. It is the gesture of the whole body, not the facial gesture, that "best communicates suffering and death." The depositions are explosive compositions of legs and arms-- the sturdy legs of the supporters, the lifeless but still agonized limbs of the one who has violently died.

The essential drama of Zajac's work comes into focus: the eternally awesome confrontation of life with death. But just as the damaged horns imply triumph, so the Pas sion must imply resurrection. It is man's oldest and dearest hope: that out of the violence will emerge, after all, some sort of victory.

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