Your good fortune

Roger Yogis has a thing for cookie fortunes. You know, the pithy little aphorisms that come inside those, some would say, inedible golden things they serve with your check at Chinese restaurants. In several of his acrylic paintings, currently up at Your Dearest Wish Will Come True, JayJay’s last show at its Curtis Park location (the gallery moves into the former Ogden Surveying building on Elvas Avenue in East Sacramento this September), Yogis enlarges various fortunes to form pop-art billboards, then frames them with appropriate backgrounds—in “Someone is speaking well of you,” the fortune lies atop a two-tone Roy Lichtenstein-styled repurposing of comic magazine advertising art; on “The time is right to make new friends,” the fortune is spelled out in 11 Chinese Kanji atop what appears to be a seafoam green-and-white floral pattern appropriated from an overstuffed armchair.

Some of Yogis’ pieces don’t rely on cookie fortunes to deliver their message. “Quo Vadis” uses a similar seafoam green-and-white floral background to frame the Latin term for “Where are you going?”; the letters are spelled out whimsically inside the kind of rectangles seen on ’50s roadside coffee-shop signage. “5 Dancers” (or “On the Beat”) depicts outlines and out-of-frame silhouettes of five miniskirted women, the kind you might see on some ’60s pop-music show, over large polkadots. “What’s That?” and “New Jolly Roger” depict Wilma Flintstone and that ’70s happy face with crossbones, respectively. Sure, the latter two fall into the “any idiot coulda done that” camp, but Yogis’ superb execution makes them transcend tossed-off kitsch.

Given the warm, friendly, big-dog tonguebath quality of Yogis’ work, you might figure he really knows how to work a room. According to gallery co-owner Beth Jones, however, Yogis is a shy, retiring sort; he’s an academy-trained man in his 50s who lacks the audacious penchant for relentless self-promotion that many artists possess. Which may be why he’s not that well known yet. With a little exposure, his coolly sweet visuals could be the toast of the town.