The Surreal and Symbolic Satire with Michael Irrizary Pagan

Michael Irrizary Pagan is a Nuyorican artist currently living in St. Cloud. Through his art he explores the psychological underpinnings of our culture by implementing surrealist and caricaturesque techniques to unveil the madness he perceives in society. Elements of symbolism and satire pervade his work, the necessary humorous treatment to trigger catharsis.

 

Michael Irrizary Pagan, M.I. Pagan, was born in Manhattan, New York, at the oldest public hospital in the United States: Bellevue Hospital. His parents were from Ponce, Puerto Rico. They divorced during Michael’s childhood. This event drove him, his brother and mother to his grandparent’s house on his mom’s side. It is during this time that Michael starts becoming acquainted with art.

His grandfather printed postcards on an old press and was prolific at calligraphy while his uncle was a master woodworker. Also, since his mother had to work two to three jobs and would take the boys with her, she would always keep them busy with pencils, colors, clay and crayons, sketching, doodling, sculpting and drawing to pass time. Michael recalls “We’d be sitting in a little cubby hole somewhere, occupying our time instead of being out in the street in danger.”

As a child people would call him an introvert because he kept everything in. The teachers noticed his silence and said he had some sort of psychological problem, so they took him to a counselor. The counselor noticed she couldn’t get anything out from him by talking, so she handed him some papers with pencils and color pencils. He started drawing and the counselor said, “There’s nothing wrong with him, this is the way he expresses himself.”

While growing up in Manhattan, he experienced a cultural rivalry and competition which boiled between different neighborhoods, but which ultimately started driving him towards art. “In Manhattan every neighborhood is a different culture, so you’re battling against everybody else to become something. I did sports, I did everything, but the one thing that fascinated me the most was painting or drawing or sketching, because it took me away from all of that, and everybody seemed to like it too. It was something that if you did, it was amazing because they couldn’t do it. And they would wonder how you did this, how you did that. ‘Can you draw me this?’ ‘Can you do that?’ And I would do that.”

This vocation calling became an escape to his surrounding reality, “At that time everybody was battling each other for attention. Who’s this and who’s that in the neighborhood. It was crazy. Doing art took me away from all of that. I didn’t have to think about that stuff. I can do stuff and enjoy doing it and not be involved with all the rest of the madness.”

However, he felt strongly inclined towards sports. He played basketball for Louis D. Brandeis High School and received a variety of scholarship offers from different schools to play with them. Yet life struck down his sports career in the form of a submarine undercut which dislocated his spine. The doctor told him he wouldn’t be able to play sports for the rest of his life. He recounts, “I was sitting there at home, popping pills, when I said, ‘What am I gonna do?’ So I started drawing. Because I got that from my mom ‘Ah, well then draw! I’ll express this and do that.’”

In the neighborhood he learned to be quiet and observant. He would look at the people, their manners, the convoluted march of life. He would analyze behaviors and fall into a reverie in front of details, “I would see figures in cracks in the walls, faces, eyes and stuff. And how would you put that down without people thinking that you’re a damn nut?”

He entered a drug program that functioned as a sanctuary from the neighborhood. All of his friends were in there that summer too. He started drawing and people started saying “Well, you got something there. Why don’t you continue doing this?”

However, Michael didn’t think much of it, but decided to take up an art appreciation course while in college. For the final project of the course the professor asked them to copy a masterpiece and write a paper on it. He went to the MET and copied Rembrandt’s Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer using crayons, ball pens and magic markers. To his astonishment, the professor gave him an A-plus for the class and told him, “The work was incredible. You should consider taking up some art courses and see where it takes you, because you have a knack here, something’s here.”

He decided to follow her advice and enrolled in art workshops. He studied under the wing of the starving artists of the Greenwich Village area and Soho in lower Manhattan. He learned from them the ways of the artist. He saw how they did what they did in order to live. “One thing they always told me that I always remember was– In Manhattan alone, at that time, there were 79,000 artists registered. Out of those, 2,000 were making a living, the rest worked all different kinds of side jobs to make ends meet.”

Yet there were three defining moments which taught him the greatest lessons he would later on apply in his incessant confrontation against the canvas. The first moment was when a professor took his final project, a clay lady reclining on a sofa, and flung it across the classroom, blasting it against a clay-splattered target painted in the wall. Michael stood dumbfound in front of his professor not knowing how to react and the professor said “You’re passed.” Michael answered “What the hell is this?” “Well, you’ve learned something,” “Oh, yeah, what did I learn?” “You learned that once it’s completed it’s no longer yours, and once it’s destroyed you just create again. And by learning that, you’ll always create something else. So you create and destroy, create and destroy. And by doing that, that process builds upon making something better. Because it’s just like chaos and creation, you go through the chaos in order to create something.” “Ok, I passed the class.”

The second was when an oil painting professor would set up a still life for the apprentices before they walked into the room. Once inside, he would have them choose an easel and start painting the still life. The professor would walk around the room and if he didn’t like what he saw, he would say “Let me help you,” he would grab the canvas, set it on the floor, pour turpentine over it to erase it and say “Start again.” Michael says people would go mad when the professor did that, but he realized something fundamental: “What he’s showing you is that it’s not that important. You just keep doing and keep working on it. And if it gets damaged, well that’s not a problem, continue.”

The third and greatest lesson came when he presented his senior project. All of the art students had to do a show, so he thought about Jackson Pollock’s drips and stains and came up with what he thought was a clever idea: he took scraps of canvas with paint that were on the floor, he burned the edges and collaged them onto a larger canvas. He then drew on top and awaited the reactions of his mentors, but instead, they remained chatting in the teacher’s lounge smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.

Michael retells “So I walk up to them and I say ‘Well, what’s the matter? I’m not getting a reaction or nothing.’ So my professor looks at me and says ‘Go cut off an ear.’ And that was it. And I sat there trying to figure out what the hell does it mean ‘go cut off an ear’, and he says ‘You sacrificed, you did, now what? You continue. You used other people’s methods and made something out of it, Ok, so now you’re there. So now, what do you do? Do you continue or not?’ I thought that was one of the greatest lessons that I learned. You may think that the work you do is incredible, and maybe it’s not. It all depends on the eye of the beholder. But if you don’t use the technical skills that you have to portray that and to put that message out, it’s not gonna work. My images, I want them to carry a message, otherwise why paint it.”

Knowing that so few artists were living off their art in a city crammed with talent, Michael took regular jobs and kept to himself, this way no one messed with him and he could make ends meet without renouncing to his art. People thought he had mental issues, but he was absorbing the ways of people’s lives, feeding the creative spirit. Later on, Michael explored art therapy because he found interesting how colors, shapes and symbols had different meanings for different people.

However, he got married and deviated from art. The marriage collapsed and he joined the military. He became a combat medic and psychiatric technician. He travelled the US, went to Korea and Japan. He saw oriental art, southwestern art, Indian art and started painting again. He says “Then I got stuck on it. And I don’t care what I did, or where I was, I did art. It’s worse than a drug when you can sit there and get everything that’s inside of you and put it out on canvas.”

On the trade of being an artist

It’s not an easy life being an artist. You’re misunderstood most of the time, and a lot of people laugh at it. Other people say “Oh, that’s a great hobby you got!” That’s the worst thing they can tell you.

—Michael Irrizary Pagan

There are a few essential elements which constitute enjoyable art for M.I. Pagan: “It’s got to be unusual, it’s gotta have movement, it’s gotta have color, and most important, it’s gotta have a message. If you don’t put symbols in your paintings with a message, then it’s just a pretty picture to me.” In this sense, art is meant to interact with viewers, not remain behind doors. He believes, “If you wanna get a message across and show something, once it’s out of your touch it doesn’t belong to you no more, it belongs to everybody else.”

In this sense, Pagan has measured the effectivity his art has in carrying the message across when viewers provide takes and appreciation of his work. He has nurtured from the audience. For him, exposure to the public eye of the artwork is necessary in order to understand if the message is clear or not. It is also a source for new understandings of the piece which can inspire new treatments of the subject. He reflected, “If you keep it locked up and put away, well, then you’re just doing it for yourself.”

His late wife Victoria, his muse, was his most important art critic. She wrote poetry, sung and confectioned clothes out of cloth scraps. She had an eye for composition and would bluntly tell him what worked and what didn’t work, what would strike and bring people in. Michael confesses, “I depended on her. To have somebody sit there and tell you truthfully and honestly something about your work, without glossing it over or trying to make you feel good or pamper you. That’s somebody to have.”

Exposing his work was part of his school learning since the teaching he received was about creativity, the creative process and the importance it carried. Exposing his work is fundamental for his creative process as well as working on a series at a time. As he says, “You start on one, and then you continue. By continuing and doing it over and over, repeating and changing, creating and destroying, you get to see exactly where you want it to be, and you have to be able to be strong enough and smart enough to say ‘Even though it’s not complete, I can walk away now.’”

He has series of clowns, buildings, churches and hospital insults. And it is within this quest that he has found universal symbols, “When you find that image and it speaks in your work, and it captivates, it captures, and it’s so strong that whenever they see it, they understand it, that’s a masterpiece, because now it becomes universal.”

Furthermore, Michael has found a channel for catharsis in his art. He has put on canvas all his childhood turmoils and trauma to show what he saw and experienced. He says, “It comes out of you, and you see it, and now you feel comfortable with it.” He has represented family members who’ve wronged him and gallerists who’ve rejected his work, “And they sold! But it was an insult.”

For Michael, symbolism is an inextricable root of art, as he said “Before man spoke, they related in symbols. Before we had the words, we had primitive man making symbols and then made them into words.” So Michael passed judgment, “All artwork is symbolic.” In this sense, words need a symbol prior to existing, and this can only be attained by what Michael calls the painted word, which is in itself an approximation to reality. Likewise, by doing this, he approaches a revelation of how words can be painted, especially expressions. For example, how do you paint money makes the pot boil, or the labourer is worthy of his hire, or hunger never saw bad bread?

In this same vein, Michael has set forth to paint what is not visible to the plain eye but nevertheless present, like the psychological conundrums of individuals and society, the manifest evils of corruption or the hidden agendas of people in power. In other words, he’s set out to paint what everybody sees but remains silent and indifferent. “Throughout history, there’s always been politics and corruption, there’s always been good and evil, life and death, there’s always been black and white, and all that stuff, no matter how we put it down, it was done before us. So there’s nothing new, the only thing new is how you express it now, or how you show it.”

This is why Pagan considers that what matters most in being an artist is finding a voice, because everyone is experiencing the same reality, but the way each individual perceives it changes, and the form the artist expresses it is the source of individuality and uniqueness, “Because there is nothing new under the sun, only how you see it and how you express it. The technique and stuff they’re using is probably different, but they were doing cave art, doing sculptures, doing pyramids. But how do you make that into a message that people recognize as something. It’s like making an outstanding asopao, it depends on what you put in it. It’s how you twist it around but it’s still soup. You add a little bit of this, a little bit of that, take from over there, put it together. In my paintings, for each work, maybe that technique works, so I use it and then throw in a little something of mine, the symbolism or the message I’m trying to get across. I use satire, take from cubism or surrealism, put it together. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

In this sense, Pagan highlights the importance of being of your time. Since these universal subjects pervade history, the only tool the artist has at hand is recognizing how these subjects are manifest during his lifetime. This requires an understanding of the tradition of art, a historical picture of techniques and movements, and a vision of where you, as an artist, stand within the realm of art and life. That’s why he doesn’t ascribe to any movement or recognize within what the critics have coined as Hispanic or Latino art, which falls under the stereotype of roosters, sugar cane plantations, fuming coffee and jíbaros contemplating the horizon. “As a Puerto Rican artist, or a Latino Artist, I’m putting a message of what I grew up with, and what I saw and what I know. And I want to show that.”

Appreciation Interlude

At first, M.I. Pagan’s art drove me into a state of bewilderment. The colors, the forms, the figures, the objects, the characters, the actions all appeared as an interpolation of seemingly unconnected elements, but under the surface of the first impression I recognized a message encrypted in their proxemics.

A teddy bear in front of a church was a lure, a bait for pedophilia. Clowns amassed in a tiny axle-less car heading towards another clown giving a speech to a long-nosed red and blue audience was the presidential rat race. The labyrinthic cityscapes of doors and stairways leading nowhere was his understanding of unregulated population and metropolitan growth. The Tres Brujos are crippled as the dogmatic beliefs politicians, soldiers and priests impose onto society to maintain their rule of chaos and debauchery. An upside-down flag for the country in crisis, a deflated pumpkin head so as to portray hollowness of thought. A long nose and a big mouth for the boisterous liars.

The dream-like paintings crept through the surrealist techniques, the words started to erupt from the image, the dance of concepts swirled to the rhythm of madness and shots of understandings came in Aha! forms. The symbols carried their message, the elements no longer appeared gratuitous or arbitrary. The strokes acquired the tint of thoughtfulness. The images displayed a harsh truth which became easier to digest thanks to the form. The art had spoken.

Coda: The scene for art in Orlando

Michael has exposed his work in California, Georgia, Alabama, New York, Texas, Maryland, New Mexico, Hawaii and Florida. He currently has some paintings showing at Queen’s University in North Carolina. You can buy his artwork in websites such as www.fineartamerica.com or by directly contacting him.

In Central Florida, he has exhibited his work at the Osceola Center for the Arts, at Kissimmee’s and St. Cloud’s City Halls, at frame shops, in libraries and at New Concept Barbershop and Art Gallery. But he considers places like City Hall aren’t a proper venue for exhibiting artwork, “People don’t go to City Hall to look at art, people go in there to pay their bills, or go to meetings.”

In this sense, Pagan considers the venues for artists to show their work are extremely limited and at times useless. Pagan says, “Here we have a problem with galleries because they dictate what they’re gonna show, not who they’re gonna show. You gotta fit into a theme. If you don’t, you don’t get shown. A lot of times you gotta pay to get into a show but the artworks together don’t make any sense. They’re also renting art spaces. You can rent a space for one or two weeks and pay a fortune, paying their rent, paying them to show you, but they’re not promoting you because you have to promote yourself. It doesn’t do anything for you, so that’s not a real gallery.”

He highlighted late Nan Boynton’s labor at the CityArts Factory and how they admitted pieces based on quality which was assessed through a small fee. He also lauded Angel Rivera’s work in establishing New Concept Barbershop and Art Gallery. Yet he recognized we’re in “Mickey Mouse land,” and tourists don’t want to take back home art pieces that cost them a couple hundred or even a couple thousand dollars, “They can get little postcards for 25 cents. That’s all they want. They’re gonna spend a thousand getting into the shows.”

Michael considers one of the greatest issues lies in promotion as well as art misplacement. “You can have a show in a bar or a restaurant. But you don’t go to a bar to look at art, you go to get drunk and pick up somebody. In a restaurant all the smoke from the cooking gets onto your painting. People go there to eat.”

As a possible solution, Michael proposes to create a space where the art forms intermingle, where master artists can pass down their knowledge to apprentice artists and introduce them to both the appreciation of the creative process as well as the final result. This way, audiences consolidate and can expand. “If you have this space where you have music, poetry, writing, painting, all that stuff in one area, people will go to it. Also, be at Avant Garde and unique and have people who are into that come here.”

But what Michael considers can change the game would be to own a gallery, “If it’s your gallery, you can do whatever the hell you want, you can manage it and you can get whoever you want. And it’ll work if you know how to publicize it. It’s not that hard, you just have to find a spot where you can get that kind of traffic. That’s what’s gonna cost you.”

For now, Michael will continue painting for that’s what he knows best, “The funny thing is that, as soon as I’m working on one, I put it aside and I’m working on another. I do too much of it and I gotta get rid of it. Hahaha.