4 minute read
Imagine Deeper
A former protege of Salvador Dali, Louis Markoya is taking Surrealism to a new dimension with his exhibit at the Imagine Museum.
BY MARCIA BIGGS
Nobody has life stories quite like Louis Markoya. The artist and St. Petersburg resident is a bit intimidating on an intellectual level, yet friendly and strangely fascinating. In a recent artist lecture at the Imagine Museum for his exhibit Imagine Deeper: Into and Beyond Your Dreams, Markoya described his life to an entranced standing-room audience, and it read like so many chapters in a bizarre novel.
As a young man living in Connecticut, he was so intrigued with a Salvador Dali painting that he got a book from the library and taught himself to paint … just like Dali. Knowing the legendary Surrealist artist wintered in New York City, Markoya phoned the St. Regis where Dali was residing and got himself invited to come for a visit. He brought photos of his rudimentary Dali-esque paintings and was immediately invited to work as a studio assistant (meaning brush washer, gopher, researcher and coexperimenter) for the next five winters.
One of their main focuses was experimenting with three dimensional art.
“The entire six years I worked with Dali, he was obsessed with one main thing – to reproduce the third dimension on a two dimension surface,” Markoya said. “This was something he had to do.”
Markoya, like Dali, was deep into molecular science and math. It was a perfect match. During those years in the 1970s, artistic eccentricity flowed from the aging Dali to his young protégé. The tales are bizarre, but then, so was Dali — molecular theory, holography, Alice Cooper, walking the streets of New York City with a flying egg hovercraft, the search for three dimensional art, dancing the Charleston with Dali … Louis Markoya has stories to tell.
After the Dali relationship dissolved in 1976, Markoya stopped painting and went to work for more than three decades as an engineer in the field of semiconductor lithography technology. But he never let go of his dreams and after retiring in 2011, delved into developing fractal imagery using digital software.
“In 2011, I found out about the three dimensional fractal and it appeared to have infinite possibilities. I felt it could be used to describe the complexities of life and the neurons in the brain or anything I could dream of, and I wanted to start to test it.”
Drawing on his background in fractals and mathematics, Markoya started researching in lenticular printing and technology, which was being used extensively for advertising in Japan and Asia, he noted. “My first idea was how to use fractals in classical paintings, so that’s how I started … using classical paintings and sculptures like David. I realized I could start a new artistic movement using fractals.”
Markoya begins his works digitally, working on the computer to visualize his ideas, which he then transfers to canvas where he often works in oil. He then photographs the finished image, adding a 3/8inch glass-like lenticular panel and lighting that together play tricks on the eyes, giving the illusion of depth as the image is viewed from different angles.
The artist moved to St. Petersburg four years ago, not to be near the Dali Museum, he claims, but to be inspired. “It’s such a thriving art community and I really think that the museums here like the Imagine are world-class museums,” he said. “I believe they deserve more attention. I have thought for years that the Imagine Museum would be a perfect venue for my work.”
Markoya rarely shows his work in public exhibitions. His last show, “A Deeper Understanding,” in fall of 2022 at the Leepa-Ratner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs, featured 70 works. Most of the 36 works in the Imagine exhibit are new.
Imagine Deeper: Into and Beyond Your Dreams will continue at the Imagine Museum, 1901 Central Ave., through July. For tickets and more information, go to imaginemuseum.com/louis-markoya or call (727) 300-1700. Check the Events calendar for scheduled Artist Talks. Markoya will be on-hand the first Thursdays of the month for After 5 from 5-8 pm; admission is $5.
