I Must Be Dreamin'

Whilst studying in the New York Studio School, Joyce Pensato started collecting a multitude of objects, toys and pop culture figurines as well as icons from the American mythology. Influenced by these characters - Mickey Mouse, Batman, Donald and Daisy Duck and The Simpsons among others, these icons soon became the central motifs of her paintings. Pensato uses the faces and expressions of these characters as the starting points of her paintings: “I start with whatever form I am interested in: cartoony Elmo eyes, Olive Oyl’s horizontal nose, or Groucho Marx’s bushy moustache and eyebrows. I am working from images that are already distorted. I am attracted to simple, outsized imagery, which is the kind usually employed in cartoon-making.  I like that a cartoon can exaggerate any feature on a form. I always start with the caricature and the basic features. Here, I’m particularly interested in the exaggerated, bulging eyes of Felix.  I feel that there is a lot of potential movement in the simplicity of the circles as eyes and the sweeping mouth” (Interview between Timothée Chaillou and Joyce Pensato). Predominately a black and white palette, the harmony from Pensato’s works, like the Yin (shadow) and the Yang (light), comes from the energy this duo produces: the union of black and white expresses a non-duality which goes beyond good and bad. Although very gestural, full of drips and expressionist splashes, with a “bad painting” aspect, Pensato’s paintings have a humour which takes off some of the weight inherent to the Abstract Expressionist movement. Her paintings are direct and frontal, they evoke the vitality of a boxing game with an expressive, lyrical gesture: “I am totally a dirty artist” the artist says (Interview between Timothee Chaillou and Joyce Pensato). Here, this portrait of Felix the Cat - with its black fur, white face and pointy ears – is the portrait of an imaginative, resourceful character, wondering yet tenacious. Like Charlie Chaplin, he represents, with optimism and romanticism, the misery of the unemployed people during the American economic crisis in the 1920s.


Timothée Chaillou