Last year I discovered a truly wondrous place, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.   Sure, the Gallery had its requisite portraits, great ones too, like Alice Neel’s iconic 1980 nude of herself; and unusual ones such as, if you can believe it, a 1955 portrait of a somewhat dejected Clement Greenberg by the artist Rene Bouche. What I didn’t expect were multitudes of non-portrait paintings by such artists as Golub, Guston, Pearlstein, Fischl, Brown, Goldberg, Motherwell, Neri, Mitchell, Rivers, and the list goes on and on, all tucked away in their downstairs exhibit rooms.

But the real reason I’m telling you about the National Portrait Gallery is that during my visit, I came face to face with a Depression-era painting of a barber shop by the artist Ilya Bolatowsky and reflexively yelled out (echo included), “Hey, that’s just like a Jodi Bonassi painting.” Jodi Bonassi is a Los Angeles artist who considers herself a conceptual surrealist with impressionistic tendencies.  Currently she has three of her paintings showing at the juried Barnsdall LA Municipal Art Gallery.

Her paintings depict frozen moments of peopled groups in public places, usually in barbershops or malls. Her backgrounds swirl, vibrate, and shimmer in a kaleidoscopic tessera like a multi-colored tapestry that she cleverly places in an off-center perspective. The roads and buildings seem to move as if they were made of rubber in some sort of warped space-time.

One needs to understand that the word “frozen” has a very special definition when applied to a Bonassi painting. True, the various individuals look like someone just yelled “freeze,” but they are frozen within a very active and dynamic environment that spills into each figure. You sense the whole painting and everything in it, static individuals included, as participants of a vibrating and jiggling dance.  My mind likes to think of it as a Bonassi version of a quantum mechanical illusion: atomic particles perpetually moving within force shells to prevent everything flying away in all direction. Not a big surprise then that her paintings are full of dynamic tension, figures looking static yet full of the life force.

Everywhere you look there’s variety (something very important to the artist) different individuals, different signs, different messages built from the movements that she observes in real-life settings. She starts by drawing and/or photographing the scenes. From her careful preparations one might conclude that Bonassi plans out her paintings, but they are, in fact, rather unplanned, for she states, “They come into my mind as patterns that I repeat again and again.” In other words, she converts her visual observations into her own very personal interpretations, iconography, and idiosyncratic style.

In her studio she enjoys exploring paint mixtures with a passion, likening it to “relaxing in a hot bath, it’s meditative.” Small wonder she can sit and paint for up to ten or even fifteen hours at a stretch.

An artist who strongly informs Bonassi is Alice Neel (Wayne Thiebaud being another favorite of hers). Like Neel, Bonassi also thinks of herself as a “collector of souls,” and many of the faces in her paintings are persons she already knows and likes (I’m still waiting for my face, hmmm.) And yet the various visages still remain enigmatic, since Bonassi once more presents us with opposing dualities, something familiar with something not so familiar. Who are these people? What are their lives and hopes?

Bonassi wants to create a narrative everywhere on her canvas and, as she states, spin it together “from my emotional mind.”  For Bonassi it’s all an emotional journey of discovery, a grand effort to personalize impersonal settings. She considers herself an “interpreter of communal exchange.” That’s what the various faces, the plethora of written messages, and the particular placements of her subjects are all about. Everything is an extension of her philosophy of life. She is saying, “Turn off your cell phones, look at me and connect…people should care a bit less about their inward egos and relate to others.” For Bonassi, “This is a way of my trying to make sense out of life.”

And that’s the Jodi Bonassi I’ve come to know, a perpetually optimistic painter looking for the humanity in everyone.