True to form Danijel Zezelj and the thoroughly modern Gardner Museum BY JON GARELICK

It shouldn’t come as a big surprise that the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s 50th artist-in-residence is a comic-book artist — Croatian-born, Brooklyn-based Danijel Zezelj. Gardner director Anne Hawley created the program in 1992 — a sharp end run around Mrs. Gardner’s probate edict that prevents any of the items on display at the Gardner from being moved or changed. How does one maintain a "living" museum in a facility designed to preserve a single curator’s vision — and thus a single "exhibit" — in perpetuity?

Hawley’s tactic was to convert the one area not covered by the Gardner will — a small room at the rear of the building near the public bathrooms — into a gallery space. She also created the position of curator of contemporary art. Beginning with Jill Medvedow (now director of the ICA) in 1994, then Jennifer Gross, and for the past five years Pieranna Cavalchini, the position has guaranteed a continuous buzz of contemporary artmaking in all disciplines. Among the 50 artists-in-residence (they get living quarters in a carriage house behind the museum as well as 24-hour access to the collection) have been writers Martin Espada, Paul Beatty, and Edwidge Danticat, musicians Elizabeth Swados, Abdullah Ibrahim, and Stefon Harris, and a slew of visual and conceptual artists in all media — from photography to painting to installations — like Abelardo Morell, Mingwei Lee, Joseph Kosuth, Todd McKie, Dayanita Singh, and Stefano Arienti.

The irony is that this tricky transformation is most in keeping with the spirit of "Mrs. Jack," who besides having a great eye (and a deep purse) for masterpieces of antiquity was also a patron and host to living artists from James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent to Henry James. It doesn’t hurt that when artists emerge from their month-long stay, their work tends to be "about" the Gardner, such as Harris’s composition The Gardner Meditations, and Kosuth’s centennial project, "Artist, Curator, Collector: James McNeill Whistler, Bernard Berenson, and Isabella Stewart Gardner — Three Locations in the Creative Process."

Zezelj (pronounced "zheh-zhay") is the perfect of-the-moment contemporary artist. A cartoonist and illustrator, he’s also an interdisciplinarian and, at 38, something of a star. His first graphic novel, Il ritmo del cuore ("The Rhythm of the Heart"), came with an introduction by Federico Fellini. He was soon creating stories and designs for Italian television, and has since become a favorite illustrator for the New York Times Book Review and Harper’s. He also works with his wife, the saxophonist and composer Jessica Lurie.

In residence at the Gardner in March 2004, he began working on the illustrations that would become the graphic novel Stray Dogs (published by the Gardner and Charta Books). This is not your typical graphic novel, even in the current environment of hot comics populated by such idiosyncratic figures as Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes. Zezelj’s eight-chapter "story" is about a female journalist from New York (though the city is never named) who spends a month at a museum a lot like the Gardner, which is referred to as "Princess" in a chapter of that name.

Zezelj’s storytelling is abstract and allusive. At times, the spare text appears unrelated to the images it accompanies, as the journalist muses on her experiences like a narrator providing voiceover for a cinematic montage — skyscraper-filled cityscapes, highway underpasses, crowded, messy urban apartments, the halls and galleries of the Princess. In some chapters, she talks with her retired construction-worker father, or goes to visit her artist friend Bibi.

In the chapter "Fish," the narrator recounts a journalistic assignment in which she was asked to track down a story about a talking fish. The short text boxes appear over a series of low-angle drawings of an urban skateboarder flying through the air as they tell us of Sejva Brik, the Georgian cook who discovered the fish, alive, in a shipment of California trout. It’s a trout "endemic" to his native region — "In his village they all talked to trout." He plans to take the trout home and return it to its river. As he tells the story, we see random images of the city, as well as Sejva in his current job — he works for the city painting over graffiti-covered walls. In one small panel, an airplane flies low over the rooftops. The story ends with three vertical panels: a hand descending into one frame over a street corner; a rooftop billboard with an image of a threatening rhinoceros; a close-up of a table top with a toy airplane and cityscape reflections in a coffee cup. The text reads: "The evening breeze is putting everyone in a better mood. Except for those who are reading the newspapers. Nothing can improve their mood." End of chapter.

The book’s 72 pages are on display in the Gardner without their text and in a different sequence, arranged for visual effect rather than narrative coherence. Zezelj paints his images with ink and brush — high-contrast black and white. His compositions break up space in complex variations — space within space, angular architectural renderings, buildings and highway overpasses, bridges. "Princess" divides the Gardner interiors into long vertical strips, the museum’s atrium garden, greenhouse, and Baroque fixtures providing a motif. One panel looks out a window at a futuristic, Metropolis-like skyscraper juxtaposed with old rooftop water tanks, bridges, and rising smoke. On the sill sits an ornamental, very Gardner-like bottle, with two flowers, the long stems curved and twined — their curve another motif.

In the unaccompanied panels, one can discern Zezelj’s delicate handling of light, even amid the sharp contrasts, as he stipples a section of black ink with white. There are references to art throughout the book — Joseph Beuys, Eadweard Muybridge, Picasso (who gets a chapter). Cinematic "quick cuts" juxtapose extreme, abstract close-ups with contextual frames — abstract shapes are revealed as the wrinkles on a bed sheet. The non-linear storytelling, the counterpoint of text with images, makes for lyrical effects.

In Stray Dogs — Zezelj has described the title as referring to "stray thoughts or stray emotions" — art becomes a refuge, a sanctuary. Zezelj’s narrator refers to building a "shelter" with words. The Gardner itself, in the character of the Princess, is both sanctuary and trap, spooking the narrator with its dark corridors and bric-a-brac. In this fictional rendering, the museum and its staff have survived a war. Back at her apartment, the narrator misses "the old princess. Its smell, its whims, its weight. Its decadent pride, blind confidence, fanatical devotion to its own survival." She concludes, "I’m getting old." Zezelj’s art of displacement and exile is built on such ambivalences. The Gardner is modern enough to contain them.

Daniel Zezelj | "Stray Dogs" | Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 280 the Fenway, Boston | through August 21 | 617.566.1401