An artist with Purpose

Nancy Nesvet

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter” (Martin Luther King Jr.)

Rodney Zelenka has clearly chosen this path, having told me that he believes in the need humans have for purpose in life, to leave footprints that honor our forefathers and shed light for the paths of our children. His realist, mostly figurative paintings and drawings, often black and white with hits of color, seem like graphic illustrations often shown in news publications, adding to the immediacy of the image and the need to read it. He claims influences including Faith Ringgold, Peter Paul Rubens (as in the Assassins of the Innocent / Saturn Eating his Child), Francisco Goya, Basquiat, Anselm Kiefer, Francis Bacon, Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, admiring artists who have the courage to make art about things that matter, and whose work is seen by a greater public, whether in news publications or in murals in spaces in the public arena.

Since the 1990’s, subjects including war, migration, hunger, displacement, abuse of power, child abuse, gender violence, global warming, forest fires, over consumption, waste, extreme materialism, loneliness, fake news, brain washing, monetary wealth and spiritual poverty, have been themes in his work. Claiming inspiration from threats to the earth and the people who inhabit it, he claims to try to break out of molds, preconditioned perceptions, searching for new forms and symbols, exploring alternative paradigms to create works of art that connect with the viewer. His claim to be a Surrealist in the 21st century is not wrong. Surrealists dreamt of a better world after the chaos and devastation of World War I. Zelenka, in his artwork, shows migration to a better or at least alternative world after the real or imagined chaotic, devastated areas of today’s world. His creative process includes first studying previous artist’s work, including Mayan frescoes, murals by Rivera and Siqueiros, paintings by Otto Dix and Philip Guston.

His compositions of gadgets and armor, especially in his recent Transformers series looks like work by Basquiat, and the surrealist, Max Ernst.

In Cubist and Italian futurist sculpture, in Picasso’s sculpture, and in Zelenka’s work, bodies are recognizable as bodies but are transformed in shape and in space, reconstructed and in motion. Since 2022, based on artists’ realistic images Zelenka painted his Transformers, considering and imagining subject matter including abuse of power, fake news, waste, overconsumption, waiting in line. Zelenka told me that he felt that, in those paintings, objects of daily use, suitcases, clothes, shoes, tires, baskets, bags, bottles, started to overwhelm the scene, and these objects, as we find in dumps, in our closets, office space, storage and that we purchase and travel with started to take center stage. Consequently, he decided to give these objects personality and replace the figurative narrative in a process of decomposition and re-composition. They became TRANSFORMERS.

His painting Waiting in Line resulted from Zelensky watching the long lines of travelers during the Covid epidemic. Due to the head coverings, suitcases balanced on heads, Peruvian style fedoras we see a resemblance to migrants marching and waiting at the gates in long, unending lines to escape to a new place, of greater safety and security, whether political or economic.

Depicting the proliferation of fake news by officials of many countries, Zelenka painted a cloud of belongings transported by migrants, calling it WEB Masters.

His painting, Hard Labor based on a work from the 18th century, “Volga Barge Haulers” suggested the most powerful and wealthiest were themselves victims of the Machiavellian world of the WEB.

Many are mixed media with elements from the street brought into the works. Paintings, sculptures and installations that were exhibited in museums in solo exhibits carry on Zelenka’s empathy for the homeless, the trapped, the mad, and mothers finally reconciled with their babies. His work also comments on matters of deforestation and forest fires, destroying homelands and nature.

His work deals with war and war’s consequences, shown almost 30 years ago, at the Sao Paolo Biennal,1996/7 and several museums.

His 2023/24, works on paper and wood sculptures, of which have been exhibited in Mexico and at the Lichtundfire Gallery on New York City’s lower east side carries on his practice of questioning authority, proliferation of the monied classes at the expense of the poor, and the middle class, the challenged and the innocent victim.

Finally, his four most recent artworks relate to migration or slavery, one the ever-present suitcase, on canvas and another of wooden hands reaching up for help? Forgiveness?

Of his last two works on paper, one relates to the freight train “The Beast”, that crosses migrants from Mexico and the wagons that took victims of the holocaust to gas chambers, or the many trains that have carried slaves in many dark times of our history. The last one, “Once a Nest”, is the ghost home, ghost parents and offspring that result from war and desperate migrations. And his work carries on, because the problems persist. And he paints every day to symbolize those persistent problems and issues, creating awareness to propel people to seek a solution. Although the condemned are caught in a spider web in his Suitcase Stories of a Condemned Voyage, they are comical and point toward an optimism in his paintings. That optimism lends hope to an often hopeless situation, and that is what characterizes Rodney Zelenka’s art.

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