Joanathan Bessaci, “Halo 2” (Zenith Gallery)
IF JOANATHAN BESSACI’S ARTWORKS ARE MORE LITERALLY MAP-LIKE than Schissel’s, that’s largely because actual maps are among his raw materials. The French-born D.C. artist’s grandfather sold old maps at a Lyon flea market, and both French and American ones feature in “Mapping the Soul,” Bessaci’s Zenith Gallery show. They’re the basis for multi-ply collages that chart the body, and perhaps the soul.
A contemporary map of central Washington underlies a cut-out portrait of Abraham Lincoln whose famous features hover above roads and bridges the former president wouldn’t recognize. (George Washington also appears, but painted on cardboard rather than collaged, and part of a series that also includes Jean-Michel Basquiat.) More complicated, and intriguing, are several anatomy lessons in which tangles of red highways suggest the human circulatory system. Some of these collages are full-bodied, while others depict simply the brain, traversed by synapses that are actually French roadways.
In the striking “Halo 2,” a woman’s face is an expanse of white whose hair, features, and profile are defined by cuts that reveal a map beneath the surface. As in all of Bessaci’s cut-and-collaged pieces, parts of the lower levels are tantalizingly unseeable, evoking submerged thoughts and emotions.
The artist’s other way of working with paper and cardboard is to make painted sculptures, mostly wall-mounted renderings of animal heads. A gorilla, a Doberman, an eagle, and a paper-fringed tiger jut from the wall. If these are less distinctive than the map-based collages, they’re equally cogent at demonstrating Bessaci’s flair for transforming flat scraps of paper into artworks of manifold depth.
