Jeff Koons Pancakes, 2001 is a frenetic amalgam of sensuality. Fusing photorealistic imagery of food, landscape and human form, Koons creates a phantasmagoric spectacle of human desire in the age of late capitalism. The present work is a study in the transmogrifying effects of early digital processors like Photoshop, which is evoked and redoubled through the exacting replication of the newly rendered visual collage into a seductive hand-painted oil on canvas. Pancakes elicits and celebrates desirousness, pleasure and consumerism, all hallmarks of Koons’ unabashed sensibility of indulgence. As he said, "You know, all of life is... just about being able to find amazement in things. I think it's easy for people to feel connected to that situation of not tiring of looking at something over and over again, and not feeling any sense of boredom, but feeling interest. Life is amazing, and visual experience is amazing." (David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London 2002, p. 334) This preoccupation with the rich and entrancing elements of visual culture is paramount to the aesthetic sensibility of Jeff Koons and decidedly embodies the quintessential spirit of his oeuvre.

Belonging to his series Easyfun-Ethereal, the present work represents a fusing of spatial layers. For this series, Koons sourced images from glossy magazines and personal photographs and then used the computer to combine these images in a deliriously optimistic reshuffle, shifting both context and scale. The collaged fragments seemingly surface unmoored to their surrounding elements, evoking an ethereal effect. Following the initial computer manipulation, these images are then transferred back to the traditional medium of oil painting with photorealistic perfection. With the Easyfun series, begun in 1999, Koons truly honed the use of his multi-layered collage imagery, exploring his new super-pop Baroque aesthetic. The collaged, disconnected images and high-key colors that comprise Pancakes are a metaphor for the bombarding stimuli of modern life. Drawing upon this diversity of imagery from both personal records and culture at large, Koons creates a work at once both instantly legible and utterly disorienting. He confronts viewers with a dazzling and prismatic projection of human desire to be visually enveloped by.

The random association between food, landscape, and sex recalls both childish and adult associations of pleasure, thought and sight. Koons substitutes whimsy for vulgarity postulating a reality where the pursuit of pleasure is unabashed. This visual lushness coupled with the vivid and multicolored palette Koons employs situates the work both as a piece in conversation with tropes of art history but also as an utterly modern invention. In his essay "Dream Machine", Robert Rosenblum comments on this robust intersection, "in surprising ways, the intricate, gravity-defiant asymmetries of many of Koons's restlessly curving shapes - the curls of a salad green, the undulant contours of breeze-blown hair - revive the language of the most spectacularly ornate manifestations of the German Baroque and Rococo art, a style that has been whimsically, but usefully, referred to as `barococo'. This gorgeous corner of art history has offered constant inspiration for Koons." (Exh. Cat., Berlin, Guggenheim, Easyfun-Ethereal, 2001, p.49-51)

Pancakes recalls a sensorial hallucination. The pancakes and peas invoke our senses of smell and taste, the hands of touch, and the landscape of sight and sound. Disembodied hands grasp and stroke a foot in the center of the composition, and at the top of the picture we see only the hands and stomach of a woman suggestively caressing herself, the rest of her figure hidden by the pristine landscape of the pond and shoreline. “I try to create work that doesn’t make the viewers feel they’re being spoken down to, so they feel open to participation,” Koons has said. Pancakes, with its visceral, familiar, yet surreal mixing of imagery achieves this idea perfectly and invites the viewer to engage, without judgement, in a truly all-consuming visual experience.

Artist

Jeff Koons