Hungarian-Canadian-American Artist; (1979- )
Strolling down Queen Street West in Toronto on a summer evening, you might find yourself wandering into the Drake Hotel and upstairs to its posh second-floor patio. Settling into a couch with a beer or a martini, you have little choice but to contemplate a bright wall-length mural that looks like a hybrid of Egyptian hieroglyphics, European surrealism and the obsessive, virtuosic doodling of a daydreaming teenager. It’s whimsical and metaphysical, and the longer you look at it, the darker and more perverse it becomes.
For this 2010 work Untitled (Romance), Zsako has painted huge, liquid, black-silhouette figures with trees sprouting from their bodies or leaf veins growing through them, floating—dancing—across the wall. There is a woman with blue liquor pouring from her breast; there are half-empty bottles and stray dogs and scuttling mice and bright orange birds. The mural exists in a space somewhere between the Garden of Eden and Sodom and Gomorrah; it’s innocent, lighthearted, orgiastic and apocalyptic all at once.
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