We entered in conversation with Canadian artist, Zachari Logan, whose poetics and aesthetics suggests a new sense of classicism, juxtaposing landscape and figuration in support of queer representation. Drawing from his international experiences and residencies, the artist discusses the fundamentals of his drawing and sculptural practice.
Zachari Logan, “Vignette”, graphite on paper, 110 x 208 inches, 2011, courtesy the artist
Sara Buoso: Would you like to talk a bit about your background, interests and the trajectory you are pursuing in your artistic practice?
Zachari Logan: Since my undergrad and my master’s at the University of Saskatchewan in Central Canada, I had a deep interest and thirst for the art historical source. My primary research has long related to the use of the body, the male body, and the queer body that in my understanding of history, was largely absent. Raised as a Roman Catholic, I was deeply influenced by Catholic imagery and in particular, male and female bodies depicted in art that expose a certain level of nudity or sensual picturing for the purpose of enforcing religious dogmatism. In my master, my focus was on neoclassical painting, primarily works of French artists rigidly centered around the narratives and politics of colonial expansionism and for my master’s research I began to question that language for the purpose of addressing a queer gaze onto the male body in modern society; that’s when began using my own body by making references to these historical languages. Directly after my master, my work – a series of monumental self-portraits and compositions of multiples of my own body – were published in a drawing journal in Paris in spring 2008 and these images were seen by a gentleman who found them compelling, later inviting me to show at his Parisian gallery, Galerie Jean Roch Dard, in Paris. Of course, upon my first visit to Paris, I saw many of the works by David, Gericault and other French neoclassicists and I was deeply affected in person, by these works both emotionally and physically. This experience of physicality is where my understanding of residencies as an extension of my studio practice became highly important. In my work I consider the language and the use of figuration; I am interested in queer figuration and language around gender and sexuality, pushing social ideas about the representation of the body in line with those terms.
Zachari Logan, “Eunuch Tapestry No. 5”, detail, pastel on black paper, 84 x 288 inches, 2015. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, courtesy the artist
This is in conjunction with your interest in the genre of landscape that connotates the background of your work.
It was when I was researching confrontational images of my own body larger than real size, that I started to think about my body in these spaces. At the time, I was invited for a residency in rural Tennessee, and I was working on a piece influenced by the show Domestic Queens, held in 2011 in Montreal. That was the moment I realized how deeply affected by the landscape I was. In thinking about the Tennessee landscape, I was also imagining my home and landscape in Saskatchewan and my absence from it, questioning how my body could fit into this narrative. There, I produced this monumental drawing, a twenty-five-foot work in graphite, Vignette, 2001: a portrait of myself, my husband and our two cats, it was a family portrait. Most of the composition of this drawing is filled up with landscape references, like an ideal Eden, an imaginative suspended space. This became the internalized space, a landscape generated by images of different botanical species that can only be pictured together in a fictive or an imagined space. This is a very important piece for my practice because it initiated my ideas of body as land: that there is no separation between bodies and the landscape, a key philosophical underpinning of most of my work. Then, I started thinking about the Prairie landscape of Saskatchewan, its particular plants – weeds, among others – and their relationship to language. The language around plants has an inherent correlation to the language employed by modern society to discuss gender difference and sexuality. In this sense, this space became one of resilience, a defiance of a monoculture, and a metaphor for a queer space as a liminal space. During a residency in Brooklyn at ISCP, I was looking at a particular Flemish series of tapestries, the Unicorn Tapestries, (1495-1505), in which the compositional space is an in between space, a flattening but also deep space built up through a pattern of flora (Millefleur style). I was also thinking about the black pictorial vacuum in Baroque painting – Caravaggio, for example, my favorite – where a viewer can see beautiful and subtle depictions of flora and fauna disappearing into an endless space. In the Eunuch Tapestry Series, 2012- to the present, I have developed my thinking about bodies, plants, animals, and the earth itself, to create a space in which there is a visual democracy and ultimately, this informs my poetics of the pictorial background. In a sense it all merges: the background and foreground have equal visual and narrative importance.
Zachari Logan, “Esta Selva Selvaggia No 1”, pastel on black paper, 2019, courtesy the artist
Would like to talk about your work Esta Selva Selvaggia, 2019, presented for the exhibition Human Landscape, at Fondazione Marchesani, in Venice, (03/09/2025 – 05/10/2025)?
This work is vastly different in its pictorial depiction of space and figuration. In 2018, I created the first drawing of this series: Nel Mezzo del Cammin di Nostra Vita, influenced by the Cantos of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, and in particular, Inferno. Concurrently, I was working on a project for an exhibition at the Studio Museum Francesco Messina in Milan, and I was interested in relating to the site, particularly the vaulting ceiling of this deconsecrated church being bombarded during the Second World War. The piece consisted of a thirty-three feet long drawing; it was an important piece for my exploration of drawing as sculpture and drawing as installation. That was the initiation of the Canto series. The following drawing in that series is Esta Selva Salvaggia, from 2019, for which I assumed a more conceptualized idea of landscape and figuration through the phenomenon of auras which I often experience myself. Auras can have incredible shapes and formations which I intend to record through drawing. Hildegard von Bingen, a German nun and mystic from the 14th century, also talked about auras in her drawings. I started thinking about how I could use these ocular disruptions to create space and to explore figuration and landscape – the density of the foliage for instance – together. I also knew that the Canto project would be shown in Venice, a city that impressed me with its water weeds, spaces, and landscape. Between invention, memory and observation, the color source chosen for Esta Selva Selvaggia relates is a citation to the painting Madonna dei Cherubini Rossi, 1485, by Giovanni Bellini, a painting that I was moved by for its strange and surreal composition. This further reminded me of Mannerist painter Arcimboldo, whose imagery feels so contemporary. Ultimately, for this piece, I was interested in transforming my philosophy about ecologies in a relationship to the body and figuration and the body, thinking also about the viewer’s body.
Zachari Logan, “Ex Libris, Flora 1_6, (Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Mann)”, coloured pencil on vintage soft cover books, 2025, courtesy the artist
You touched on interesting historical and suggestive images – Eden, Inferno – which both evoke a sense of beauty and fragility. How would you define the aesthetics you are pursuing in your work?
Differently from techno-aesthetics, I am interested in enchantment. For me, a single image slows me down, like the image of The Unicorn Tapestry, for example, it is deeply complex and it demands a slow time to fully observe it. This leads to a sense of enchantment which regards both beauty and fragility. The philosophical underpinning of my work is to see humans as land with no separation. This is metaphoric and poetic way of thinking, but it is also very concrete and material. Scientific assumptions support these understandings: in the world there is simply no unnatural. Are we making the right choices? What are we as humans causing to our co-species on the planet? These questions, I think, are intertwined and connected to an idea of enchantment. Essentially, my presentation of landscape seeks to evoke a place where one can come back to feel a sense of enchantment, and this belongs to us all
Info:
She is interested in the visual, verbal and textual aspects of the Modern Contemporary Arts. From historical-artistic studies at the Cà Foscari University, Venice, she has specialized in teaching and curatorial practice at the IED, Rome, and Christie’s London. The field of her research activity focuses on the theme of Light from the 1950s to current times, ontologically considering artistic, phenomenological and visual innovation aspects.
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