02 Mar 2012

Kunsthalle Lingen presents Luis Jacob: A finger in the pie, A foot in the door, A leg in quicksand

The work of the Canadian artist Luis Jacob (born 1971 in Lima, living in Toronto) became known to a wide public no later than his participation in documenta 12. Since then, the Kunstverein in Hamburg and the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach have presented individual exhibitions, and Luis Jacob has taken part in group exhibitions in the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art, and at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. The Kunsthalle Lingen gallery is presenting a large-format exhibition of this internationally famous artist.

Luis Jacob works in the artistic media of paint, collage, video, and installation. In addition, he is the author of works on the theory of art. One series which characterises his work is entitled 'Album'. So far it consists of numerous images which Luis Jacob isolates from books and periodicals, and then presents in a row of arcs, laminated in transparent film. In this way, they augment themselves into compositions of narrative threads woven into each other, which unravel from panel to panel. The albums include numerous stories in images, which have open beginnings and open ends. Luis Jacob himself understands the visual and the proportional as different methods of standing up for oneself in the world. The albums depict the world as a construct in whose composition, reconfiguration, reformulation, deformation, and transformation every person plays their own part.

In 2008, monochrome paintings were created after the examples of the American artist Mark Rothko; these were titled 'They Retreat to the Home of Their Waiting'. Luis Jacob designates them as 'empty images', because, instead of paintings, monochrome colours, almost blank spaces, desolate canvases, and negations of paintings appear in the course of the achievement of colour-field painting by Mark Rothko, Gerhard Richter or also Ad Reinhardt. By gratefully painting again these pictures, which were created in the 1960s, Luis Jacob in 2008 recalls this great step forward in abstraction, and poses the question: to what extent is this still of relevance. A further series of pictures in acrylic on canvas, with the title 'They Sleep with One Eye Open', was also created in 2008, and consists of works which recall a batik technique of the 1970s. In each, two eyes stare hypnotically from wild, bright structures at the viewer, and create a hallucinatory effect.