1/15/2015 RICHARD JACOBS: SOUL DELAY - The Brooklyn Rail

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/12/artseen/richard-jacobs-soul-delay 1/4

ArtSeen December 18th, 2014

RICHARD JACOBS: SOUL DELAYby Sarah Goffstein

JACK GEARY CONTEMPORARY | SEPTEMBER 12 – OCTOBER 11, 2014

The work of Richard Jacobs reaches us slowly. For many years, this Yale MFA graduate has paintedin the seclusion of his Vermont studio. Although Jacobs’s paintings immediately reference theurgency of AbEx gestures and even Arp’s early chance collages, there is an indirectness in his processthat literally requires the paintings to take time to develop, not so unlike an analog photograph. Infact, the depth of detail within his chromatic spills give parts of the paintings a quality usuallyassociated with the grain of film or pixels, because the loose pigment combined with acrylic mediumis oddly precise and atmospheric. Here, the nonchalance of planned accidents meet calculated,masked geometries of carefully deliberated compositions. These layered paintings combine aprovisional approach with the attention of someone who is deeply conversant with painting’shistory.

The foundation of Jacobs’s practice was built while studying batik in Bali as a Luce Scholar in 1987.Masking and the unpredictable results of liquid dyes have been carried forward into Jacobs’sabstractions. Because the layers are separated into a relief of puddles and masked areas that bear arelative time stamp, works such as “Frenhofer”(2014) are almost diagrammatic of AbEx paintingpractices. Created on a translucent ground, bluish grey, sepia, and black chaotic squiggles congeal inwashes of semi-transparent ooze. The final strata are clearly delineated in thick opaque interlockingforms that bring to mind de Kooning’s “Pink Angels,” circa 1945.

This planned displacement in which one area is partially obscured by the next is an excellentmetaphor for the type of “soul delay” that Jacobs mentioned he had experienced many times whiletraveling internationally during his other life as a jewelry designer. It is a term derived from WilliamGibson’s novel, Pattern Recognition, and describes how the soul cannot travel as quickly as thebody. While Jacobs is not overly concerned with New Age or religious ideas, he is deeply committedto creating abstractions that come to life through an alchemy of invention and the intuitive“listening” process that is part of the generative DNA of

1/15/2015 RICHARD JACOBS: SOUL DELAY - The Brooklyn Rail

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/12/artseen/richard-jacobs-soul-delay 2/4

Behind the Waterfall, 2014, oil, acrylic, and dye onsilkscreen, 72 × 48 in

Frenhofer, 2014, oil, acrylic, and dye on silkscreen, 48 ×48 in

most good paintings. This aligns him with Modernists,such as Matisse. However, the ripping away andinterruption of otherwise grand painterly gesturesclearly belong to the precarity of this moment. Forinstance, In “Rain” (2003 - 13), big sweeping violetbrushstrokes extend a large calligraphic shape that isprematurely ended in multiple places—most noticeablyin a sweeping downward gesture that was abruptly slicedaway.

In“Behindthe

Waterfall” (2014), what at first appears to be a luminous collage of printed and painted cut-outs inultramarine, cerulean, and phthalo hues then starts to look like a “Blue Nude” processed through ablender. Also, the ground is a silkscreen scrim stretched over a bright aluminum frame, making thepainting appear to float. As a nod to Sigmar Polke and Carla Accardi, the translucency offers afleeting quality while also preventing the paintings from fully congealing as objects. On some levelthey are like projections which have an uncertain relationship with the wall despite their resolutelyrectangular format.

Among Jacobs’s strongest work are “Lantern I” and “Lantern II” (both 2014), which featuresuspended cubes that offer surfaces for lapidary paintings illuminated subtly from within. Theirplacement in space asks the viewer to slowly circle the works and observe how the embryo-likeabstractions evolve morphologically from one panel to the next. The reduced palette and effortlessprocess-oriented surfaces allow a direct clash between chance and precise underlying geometries,resulting in objects that are kooky, alive, and playful. They are also visually permeable, allowingtraces of the paintings on the other side of the lantern to be glimpsed through the silkscreen. Thisadds a type of physical depth that most paintings otherwise do not possess.

1/15/2015 RICHARD JACOBS: SOUL DELAY - The Brooklyn Rail

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/12/artseen/richard-jacobs-soul-delay 3/4

Lantern I, 2014, oil, acrylic, and dye on 4 silkscreens, 27× 22 × 22 in

A willingness to embrace chance and the way that someof the paintings hover on a translucent support suggestsa provisionality that situates the pieces squarely in thepresent. However there is a middle ground negotiated inJacobs's work that is usually not seen in most casualabstraction. As Sharon Butler described in “TheCasualist Tendency,” “What distinguishes a casualistapproach is the premium on unexpected outcomesrather than handsome results.” Richard Jacobs is anartist who actively collaborates with chance, but he doesso with a joyous sense of workmanship that takes root inpainting’s past. It may have taken him almost twodecades to return to showing in New York, but the waitwas worthwhile.

CONTRIBUTOR

Sarah Goffstein

RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Sigmar Polke’s PhotographicUnconsciousby Maika Pollack

JUNE 2014 | CRITICS PAGE

In Sigmar Polke’s untitled photograph of 1975, the artist appears to float, his body suspended between a nakedmattress and a curtain’s edge. The print is oriented horizontally and the images on it vertically, heightening theimpression of weightlessness.

MATISSE In Search of True Paintingby David Carrier