An Appreciation of Istvan Banyai’s “Zoom”

You see an orange comb crowning a rooster in a farmyard. As your field of vision widens you realize that this farmyard is a tabletop toy being assembled by a young girl. Your field of vision expands, revealing that the scene of the girl and farmyard is actually in a magazine being read by a drowsy boy. Your vantage point moves backward, you see the boy is lounging next to a pool on the deck of a cruise ship. Your eye zooms backward, showing you that the cruise ship is actually an advertisement on the side of a bus in metropolitan traffic. Zoom, you discover the bus is a scene in a television show being watched by a man in the Arizona desert. Zoom

The reader of Istvan Banyai’s “Zoom” is initially lulled into believing that each page illustrates a simple decreasing of the magnification of the original image. The magic happens when further zooming outward forces the mind to formulate a new gestalt, which is subsequently overturned and replaced. Perhaps Banyai is tickling the mind via repeated paradigm shifts! Each lyrically illustrated world in “Zoom” is a matryoshka doll nested within the world we discover a few pages later. Each of these nested worlds is brought to life by a draftsmanship that evokes a delightful fusion of Egon Schiele and Jean Giraud.

Banyai was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1949. He defied the authoritarian backdrop of his formative years by cultivating an artistic style that was “an organic combination of turn-of-the-century Viennese Retro, interjected with American pop, some European absurdity added for flavor, served on a cartoon-style color palette.” In the 1980s Banyai immigrated to the United States, flourishing as a magazine illustrator. “Zoom” received widespread critical acclaim when it was published in 1995. Visit Istvan Banyai's website here.

“Zoom” holds a special place in my heart. I’m principally a painter. Paintings are frozen moments that evoke a mood or idea. Narrative in painting is ethereal, being either implied by the artist or inferred by the viewer. The virtue of the indecisive nature of narrative in painting is that it allows for long periods of contemplation. The underlying aesthetic experience is enriched by the ability of the viewer to write a story when gazing at a painting. Several years ago I’d become restless. I also wanted to construct decisive narratives with a beginning, middle and end. Painting was no longer enough. About that time I came across “Zoom.” It gave me a jolt because I saw that Picture Books could be another way to combine storytelling with quality illustration. Picture Books could truly be for All Ages.

“Zoom” helped me see the world differently.