Z Garden is Zavros’ second solo exhibition with Sullivan+Strumpf. His first, A Guy Like Me, presented in Sydney near the end of 2020, was a series of eight lightjet print photographs. The photographs capture Zavros’ doppelgänger mannequin, christened Dad, in scenes ostensibly drawn from Zavros’ life. Dad-as-Zavros is staged in turn by his pool, in his car, at the beach, with his three children, and with his horses. Dad is a self-portrait in plastic, embodying not just the self, but the self as we wish or strive for it to be. In the artist’s words: “He’s a better version of me – 6”3, broader, more cut, a bit younger, and a lot smoother.” The perfect self, captured in perfect vignettes from his perfect life.

All of Michael Zavros’ works are self-portraits, in one sense or another. They are also interrogations of the form and function of self-portraiture. The integration of front-facing cameras in smartphones and of the internet in our lives is complete, gifting the means and motive for self-portraiture to the masses. What, then, is the purpose of a self-portrait in 2021? So asks Michael Zavros.

A Guy Like Me makes manifest the interplay between Zavros’ self-concept and (what he imagines to be) others’ perception of him. The photographs examine the interactive, durational performance piece that is the self – on Instagram, in the art world, and living in 2021. The artist is nothing if not self-aware. The artifice is apparent – we can see the labour and the seams. The Ken doll’s expression is vacant, his perfect body as stiff as a board. The joins between his perfectly-proportioned limbs are gaping, and his flawless skin and hair look waxen and slippery. Dad is a stand-in, an avatar for consumption. Maybe the doppelgänger is a humanoid offering made by Zavros to the gods, to the people, to his eager audience, to his ego – a bait-and-switch, to rescue his ‘self’ from Erysichthonian desire and destruction.

This kind of double vision runs as a thread through Zavros’ practice, whose clever inversions, subversions, and trompe l’œils reflect on the cultural conditions of forever and today: identity, vanity, narcissism, perfectionism, desire, beauty, youth, and death, among others. Though he is best-known for his photorealistic paintings, of which there are 5 in Z Garden, he works across painting, drawing, photography, moving image, performance, and sculpture. Zavros draws from European and American painting traditions, and on ancient and contemporary Greek references (Zavros is, as his name might suggest, Greek-Cypriot). His visual language is beautiful, opulent, and darkly funny. Horticulture, architecture, décor, and objects of consumer culture figure alongside animals, fabled creatures, children, skeletons, and the artist himself.

Everything in Z Garden either is or contains a ‘Z’ – for Zavros. This tongue-in-cheek mode of self-portraiture recalls Zavros’ painting Mock orange (2014), in which the loosely-coiled peel of one semi-nude orange trails down from a stemmed silver compote, filled with oranges, leaves, and blossoms. The painting references a tradition of Dutch still-life painting, in which painters depicted peeled citrus to flex their talent or skill. Zavros’ orange peel falls in the shape of a Z.

Zavros’ paintings are obsessively intricate. The scale of the labour is so overwhelming and the realism so absolute that they defy belief in their human origin. They must be magic. Summer Garden with a Z (2021) is one such turn. It is a major work in every sense, measuring four square metres, in which Zavros has replanted the north parterre garden of Versailles, using found imagery from an ‘80s coffee table book, in the shape of a Z. In an Instagram post documenting the painting in progress, a foraging bumblebee mistakes Zavros’ painted marigolds and begonias for the real thing. Life imitates art imitates life, with Zavros’ bee an Anthophilic inversion of the tale of Vasari’s fly.

In Discobolus with a Z (2021), a near-life-size bronze sculpture in glossy black, the familiar figure of Myron’s Discobolus is whittled to a Z. The original Discobolus (disc-thrower) was created in bronze, around 460-450 BCE, by the Athenian sculptor Myron. It belongs to the Classical period of Ancient Greece – a golden age of art, architecture, philosophy, science, and mathematics. The sculptures of this period are remembered for the technical advances they demonstrate, and as examples of Polykleitos' Canon, a treatise on the ideal mathematical proportions, balance, and symmetry for representing the human body in sculpture. Myron’s Discobolus is a renowned example of these Classical ideals – an anthropomorphised Fibonacci spiral in bronze, whose tightly-wound, perfectly-balanced, beautiful form echoed across millennia.

The Discobolus is also an example of the ways in ideals can be appropriated and weaponised. A Roman copy of the disc-thrower was owned and adored by Adolf Hitler, who loathed ‘degenerate’ Modernist art. He paid 5 million lire in cash for the Discobolus, and gave it as a gift to the German people, citing it as the ideal of progress, beauty, and perfection towards which the Herrenrasse must strive. Rendered (in this case) in pure white marble, the disc-thrower was co-opted as the pin-up boy for Nazi eugenics and mythology.

In both Classical Greece and Nazi Germany, the Discobolus symbolised, to their subscribers, all that is good and right and true: how a person should live and be. Zavros purposefully reappropriates these ideals in Discobolus with a Z, remaking the Discobolus in his own Z-shaped image. The artist heightens the reappropriation, and the tension between the naturalistic and idealistic, by simultaneously augmenting the disc-thrower’s ‘ideal’ qualities – adding muscle and definition – and its resemblance to himself – reworking the hands and veins to echo his own. Discobolus with a Z recalls the works from A Guy Like Me – the self not as it is, but as we wish or strive for it to be. We are compulsive, and insatiable.

This culture of relentless self-optimisation extends beyond physical appearance and encompasses every dimension of the self. But there is no one, fixed ideal. We choose, construct, edit, and validate our self in relation to shifting ideals and ideas. We live on the shifting sands of reality, truth, and facts. The more we learn about the dual behaviour of matter through quantum physics, and the more the spoils of technological ‘progress’ are weaponised in deep fakes and disinformation-for-hire, the more the structure we rely upon slips through our fingers. What if there is no good, no right, no true, no real? Who are we? What are we all doing? We can only believe what we see, and we can only see ourselves. No matter where you go, there you are. We are trapped in a house of mirrors, and there is no escape. Far from claiming to be the virtuous one, Zavros offers himself up on a silver platter for critique. But, of course, we can only see ourselves. Is Zavros Narcissus, and we the lake, or is it the other way around?