A portrait in oils. Can there be anything else in the art world that smacks as much of rear-guardism as that? Any serious contemporary artist who thinks they can move things ahead by painting portraits has got to be either crazy-brilliant, or plain crazy-crazy. The verdict is still out on Sadko Hadzihasanovic -- often known simply as Sadko -- the talented Toronto painter whose latest solo show opened at Paul Petro Contemporary Art earlier this month.
When Sadko first arrived from Bosnia in 1993, he began to make his mark on the Canadian scene with a series of people paintings that weren't really portraits.
There was his well-known Self-Portrait as Antonio B., first shown at Toronto's artist-run Red Head Gallery in 1996. It showed the darkly handsome artist posing as his Hollywood look-alike, getting ready to blow someone away with a honking-big automatic. Of course, the painting might have been more convincingly macho had it not been painted on delicately floral wallpaper. And the little kid's drawing stuck to its middle isn't exactly tough-guy stuff, either.
Despite its claims to self-portrayal, this picture was more interested in speaking to us about guys and dolls and kids and violence than about Sadko Hadzihasanovic. (The artist's arrival in Hollywood-drunk North America from the war-torn, terminally macho Balkans clearly informed the painting's content, but it isn't simply about that autobiography.) Despite appearances, Sadko wasn't really working in a traditional genre; he was using portraiture as an artistic medium for making wide-ranging contemporary art.
Sadko's next major work, also first shown at the Red Head and now up again at Paul Petro, at first seems more like traditional portraiture than the Banderas piece, but turns out to be even further from it. The 50 Most Beautiful Guys in the Universe (1997) looks like a giant suite of ultra-fetching male portraits, displaying all of Sadko's skills as a painter in oils. (He had a classical training in Bosnia, and for some time made a kind of living doing straighter-than-straight portraits on the streets of Toronto. He now teaches traditional skills to the amateurs enrolled at the city's Avenue Road Art School, and to art students at the University of Guelph, an hour west of Toronto.) But it doesn't take long to realize that Sadko, for all his talents, was unlikely to have had contact with Will Smith, Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves and the other heartthrobs he portrays. Turns out the work is based on photos culled from an identically titled article in a teen magazine called Young and Modern; the piece clearly speaks about how guys are portrayed, and consumed, in mass culture, rather than about the guys themselves. These portraits don't strive to be windows onto the souls of Hollywood celebrities. (Assuming they have such, of course.) They are windows onto the bizarre psyche of our consumer culture. They speak about what it means to gobble up all this proferred cheesecake, rather than about the dishy guys themselves. (One of the curious things about the piece, as noted in an essay by curator Stuart Reid when it first appeared, is the delicate effeminacy of many of these so-called studs. Though aimed at young girls, there's a homoerotic content to the images that can't be denied, and that is only complicated when they're appropriated by this hunkishly hetero male painter.)
And that brings us to the brand new work in the Petro show.
Two witty pictures carry on in the same rich vein as his earlier work, but move from the world of pop culture to the narrower world of art-making.
A painting called Hi, my name is Clemente. I like to travel to India, and another called Hi, my name is Baselits [sic] and I like to live in Africa, poke quiet fun at two big names in 1980s painting, Francesco Clemente and Georg Baselitz. Their bold assertions of identity smack of top-of-the-heap egocentrism -- "I'm Francesco Clemente and you're not" -- that seems to come across equally strongly in Sadko's portraits of them. And when Sadko reduces their personalities to a single tag-line about their love of Third World culture, it's hard not to think of the charges of superficial exoticism that are often levelled against their art -- especially when Sadko tattoos a stereotypically sexy Indian dancer across Clemente's forehead. Finally, when Sadko decides to hang the portrait of Baselitz upside down, in empty imitation of Baselitz's trademark artistic gesture, you realize that these erstwhile art stars have been reduced, distilled, commodified -- sound-bitten -- in just the same way as those 50 beautiful guys that hang across the room from them. And you have to wonder if either of these high-fashion painters will flash in the pan for that much longer than any teen idol.
All this is Sadko at his very talented best -- biting, witty, sardonic and deadpan, under a softening glaze of old-fashioned skill in an old-fashioned genre. And those are all the qualities he risks losing when he stops using portraiture as an artistic device, and embarks on it for real.
Nine other paintings in this show are respectful, even worshipful portraits of leading figures from the Toronto scene, done in Sadko's trademark style -- wallpaper grounds, bits of scribbly writing here and there on the surface, glued-on scraps of relevant printed matter -- but without his trademark bite.
Sadko's dealer Paul Petro comes off as the same good-looking nice-guy that he seems in person. Powerful curator Jessica Bradley seems even more elegant and intelligent than in the flesh -- flattered, rather than probed, by Sadko's brush. And bubbly local artist Julie Voyce, a famous character on the Toronto art scene, comes across as . . . bubbly local artist Julie Voyce, a famous character on the Toronto art scene.
It's not that these portraits don't do their work successfully: They are genuinely eloquent evocations of the people they portray. It's just that it takes more than that to turn a portrait into a work of art at the beginning of the 21st century. In place of the sidewalk-artist portraits that once made him some cash, Sadko's just started to do commissioned portraits in the bolder style of his serious art. But I think the difference between his bread-and-butter portraiture and his real, talented art-making is as evident as ever -- and I just hope the former doesn't manage to squeeze out the latter. Sadko Hadzihasanovic: Portraitism is at Paul Petro Contemporary Art, 265A Queen St. W., Toronto, until April 1. Call 416-979-7874.