-=+
by Istvan Banyai
Harry N. Abrams Inc.

"This will last one train ride, tops."

That was my initial assessment of illustrator Istvan Banyai's latest book, "-=+" (Minus Equals Plus). It's about 170 pages of illustrations, priced at $29.95, dressed up with a neat fold-out gimmick cover and a cerebral title apparently aimed at the cultivated Yuppies who appreciate Banyai's work, which appears regularly in venues like The New Yorker, The New York Times and Rolling Stone.

The book lasted more than three rides. A reader whipping through the pages of "-=+" will miss Banyai's rich layers of detail. The details don't hide coyly beneath the surface, however — they call out seductively, spilling forth from the multifaceted drawings that fill the book's pages.

On the most basic level, Banyai's illustrations are about the title's promise: positives and negatives. Every page belches forth echoes and reflections, distorted replicas and mirror images. A construction worker with a jackhammer blasts away at the feet of a bookworm in a business suit. An old man falls, attached by strings to the extremities of a young boy in short pants. An old black couple in conservative clothes stares into a pond at their radical, hippie reflections. Paradoxes and opposites dance through the pages.

Banyai draws like an Eastern European intellectual trying to grapple with the contradictions between the decadent West and his more austere and serious origins. His style is self-conciously varied, ranging from rich colorful surrealistic spreads all the way down to neat, iconic black-and-white sketches. He moderates and changes his mode of expression to fit the ideas he wishes to express, summoning a tumbling procession of penguins, imps, marching soldiers, trains, cat-women and sushi rolls. Piggy banks push shopping carts. Cyberpunks interview atomic dogs. The whole thing is a circus parade of whimsy, an intoxicating blend of twisted European surrealism shot full of New York/Los Angeles hedonism and a strong dose of urban sensory overload.

All in all, it's a perfect fit for the artist's biography. A Hungarian by birth, Banyai emigrated to the United States, where he has become a leading illustrator by catering to sophisticated tastes and jaded imaginations. But he is not merely a pleaser of plush sensibilities — with "-=+," Banyai shows he is capable of captivating his audience with a mesmerizing and playful form of visual storytelling.

At his best, Banyai spins a thread of narrative by taking a single sequence of images and continually changing the viewer's lens of perception. A hand dances across a piano's keyboard. It becomes clear that the piano player is a small model held by a diver. The diver, it appears, is a nothing but a tiny toy in a bathtub inhabited by a chubby boy. The bathtub and the boy sit in a dollhouse, which is being viewed by a little girl, who sits on the page of a comic book being read by aborigines, who sit atop a plateau being passed by bounding kangaroos, who decorate an Australian stamp on a package being carried by camel to Cairo...

For the range of his style, for the precision of his craft, and for the intoxicating breadth of his imagination, Banyai should be required reading for those who want to express themselves through images — or those who appreciate the deft blend of pop-culture and high-concept that Banyai seems to spread effortlessly across the pages of "-=+."

On my third trip home with Banyai, I realized the real pleasure of his book — the reader becomes part of his hypnotic, never-ending sequence. And so it was that an onlooker at North Station watched a passing train. On that train, a passenger looked at a mixed tableau of seated Bostonians. Amongst that tableau sat a young man reading "-=+." And within that book, a hand danced across the stark black and white of a piano's keyboard...

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)