Robert Jacks

From the start of his career as a painter, forty years ago, Robert Jacks, along­side his min­i­mal grids and mono­chro­mat­ic fields of colour, has been inter­est­ed in com­pos­ing abstract paint­ings as though they implied a nar­ra­tive or pos­sessed the pres­ence of a still life. In this mode, the paint­ings either progress from piece to piece, from shape to shape, form to form, or jux­ta­pose oppos­ing ele­ments with­in a cen­tral over­lay of shapes, rem­i­nis­cent of the clas­sic design of late Cubism. The City Sleeps, belongs to the pro­gres­sion, or per­haps more accu­rate­ly, the pro­ces­sion­al pieces. For a dou­ble pro­ces­sion occurs in these paint­ings: the pro­ces­sion is with­in each paint­ing and from paint­ing to paint­ing, imply­ing a walk­er in the city, even the fla­neur. Although Jacks sets up each pan­el as a hor­i­zon­tal panora­ma, each paint­ing is ver­ti­cal­ly, even ver­tig­i­nous­ly, com­posed. There are voids and vol­umes, mass­es and the spaces between them in The City Sleeps and The City Ris­es, less so in The Sound of the City where the blocks and grounds have a tighter, more rhyth­mic quality.

The effect of ver­ti­cal­ly arranged or com­posed pic­tures in hor­i­zon­tal, land­scape for­mats is to slow the process from sim­ply read­ing them at a glance to one which goes from stack to stack, not­ing the vari­a­tion in tone, scale and in the fit of block to block. The City Sleeps and The City Ris­es are com­posed around six ver­ti­cal­ly deter­mined stacks or blocks, rem­i­nis­cent per­haps of the inter­change between sky­scraper and city street.

Robert Jacks has always been a keen stu­dent of mod­ern art. His ear­ly work abound­ed in quo­ta­tions from Bran­cusi, Arp and Tan­guy. Lat­er he para­phrased the Picas­so of the 20s and Braque­’s syn­thet­ic cubism. With the present pic­tures two artists cast light on Jacks’ poet­ry. The gener­ic title The City Sleeps has an over­tone of Edward Hop­per’s ambigu­ous aubades and noc­turnes of a name­less Amer­i­can city and there is some­thing of the weight, the thick­ness of expe­ri­ence that Hop­per instills in his finest urban scenes.

Anoth­er echo is of late Mon­dri­an, the painter who began to attach Lon­don and Trafal­gar Square to some of his most aus­tere com­po­si­tions and who breaks into a sub­lime dynamism in his New York Boo­gie Woo­gie paint­ings. As with Jacks’ The City Sleeps and The City Ris­es paint­ings, we inevitably read these paint­ings as silent nar­ra­tives of urban real­i­ties — traf­fic, city lights, the flow and counter-flow of the great metropolis.

But if Jacks is a stu­dent of clas­sic 20^th cen­tu­ry paint­ing, he is unques­tion­ably a mas­ter here of his own mate­r­i­al. With their scale, their live­li­ness, their sense of under­ly­ing order and pro­por­tion, the bal­ance of the ran­dom and the con­tained, they are mas­ter­pieces of con­tem­po­rary painting.

Patrick McCaugh­ey 2006